Supanet- cease fee

Ehwhy88

Good Afternoon. I hope I'm posting this in the right section, please correct me if I'm wrong!

My mother passed away on Saturday 3rd of August and alongside everything else I'm having to go through the maelstrom of sorting bills, utilities, wheelchair collection, etc. She lived alone at her flat.

Supanet, who after being told that Mum has passed and being provided with a death certificate, rather curtly told me I would need to pay a cease fee and arranged for the final bill to be forwarded to me. 

The correspondence, sent to my email, was addressed to my late Mum and said they were sorry she was leaving- automated system or not I found that appalling. It listed the cease fee. 

Their statement of Internet terms says in 14.3 that a cease fee, where the customer leaves and does not request a MAC code or use another transferring system must be paid. This would be difficult for Mum to do, being dead and everything. 

It also states that the fee is not applicable where the customer moves house and Supanet cannot provide service in that area. I'll be honest, I've not done a postcode check but I'll be mightily surprised if they can provide service at Mum's new address- namely the afterlife?

I appreciate I probably don't have a leg to stand on, responsibility still lying with the estate and being an executor etc etc but any advice on how to approach this when it feels massively unfair would be gratefully received. 

Kind regards

iniltous

Sorry for your loss , It was fairly common years ago for ISP  to raise a cease fee but only if the customer was giving up broadband completely or changing network provider, if the customer was just changing provider but continuing to use the same Openreach network the cease fee was never justified.

Most ISP  gave this  ‘fee’ up after Ofcom criticised it and said it wasn’t justified , but they never ( AFAIK ) outlawed  it , however I would say the T&C stating a MAC  code must be ancient ( and may not be current ) as MAC codes have not been used for decades, switching doesn’t use MAC codes .

You could ask them ,  given the circumstances ,  to waive the fee ,  but they probably won’t , some companies ( BT for example ) have bereavement teams and a more sympathetic attitude.

Neil_Jones

I have an abject feeling Supanet was dissolved a few years ago and somebody else has picked that operation up.

Its almost certainly repackaged something else, does it have something to do with former companies Time and Tiny?  They had a "provider" of their own which was repackaged something else...  I think it was Freeserve (at the time) in new colours.

littleboo

I would ignore them and see if they fancy pursuing it through the estate.