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Ed Vaizey Slams BT Service Quality and Seeks End to Separate Line Rental

Thursday, Mar 10th, 2016 (8:36 am) - Score 1,185

The UK Government’s Digital Economy Minister, Ed Vaizey MP, has taken a break from praising the progress of BTOpenreach’s “fibre broadband” (FTTC/P) roll-out in order to criticise them for their “absolutely woeful” customer service. At the same time he also called for ISPs to stop advertising line rental with a separate price and called for clearer broadband speeds.

It’s fair to say that Ed Vaizey’s role as one of the people responsible for overseeing the Government’s national Broadband Delivery UK project can be an awkward one with a difficult balancing act at its centre, particularly when most of those state aid contracts have been gobbled up by BT (Openreach).

On the one hand this position requires Ed to praise the progress being made with great frequency, while on the other his role as an elected politician requires him to be critical of services or institutions that might be failing members of the public. Some would say that his balance has not always been level, preferring to praise far more than criticise the incumbent telco.

Needless to say that there’s no shortage of other MPs for whom Openreach’s service quality has become somewhat of a persistent bugbear, as demonstrated by January 2016’s not entirely well put together Broadbad Report (supported by 121 cross-party ministers). More recently Ofcom has also called for further service improvements (here).

Never the less Ed Vaizey appeared to take a day off from praising Openreach on Wednesday and instead sided with other ministers who were criticising the operator for a number of issues, such as slow repairs and failing to provide enough capacity for new phone and or FTTC/P connections in some areas (e.g. street cabinets do sometimes fill up and this often takes a long time to resolve before new orders can be made, which may in some cases also result in misleading network availability claims).

Ed Vaizey MP said:

“I’m completely at the end of my tether, I agree with all the complaints made by all my colleagues in this debate, and I’m going to make sure there is action. I hope that if we debate this subject again in a year’s time we will have seen some action. Members may see a different Minister if I do not succeed, but we will do our best to make some progress.

I should say, though, that I have no truck with Openreach and its customer service levels.”

Mind you Vaizey did still find time to praise the BDUK and BT broadband roll-out, again: “There has been only one failure in the superfast broadband roll-out programme that I have supervised and that was in south Yorkshire, where we inherited a useless Labour contract and had to write off £50 million of taxpayers’ money. Everything else has been an unadulterated success,” said Vaizey.

Vaizey then called on BT to take a closer look at the recent outcome from Ofcom’s Strategic Review and advised that Openreach “come to the table with credible answers to it.” In the end it seems as if the Government line is now falling in firmly behind the regulator.

On the flip side BT Group’s CEO, Gavin Patterson, has already acknowledge that it has some deficiency in service quality and promised to improve matters (despite appear to meet Ofcom’s existing targets). At the same time he’s fighting for Ofcom to remove “the destabilising threat of structural separation” from their proposals and they’ve also raised concerns about the regulator’s call for a new / more independent governance structure at Openreach.

Both Ofcom and the Government would prefer BT to reach a voluntary agreement, which is preferable for all involved, but the regulator has warned that if a deal cannot be reached then they will impose change and that could still include everything up to even a full split (although we still view the latter outcome as being highly unlikely to happen).

Elsewhere Ed Vaizey also waded into the already over-politicised investigation of how ISPs price their services (details here and here) and he gave support to the single pricing proposal, which would require providers to stop advertising the cost of line rental separately from broadband (this would make broadband and phone bundle pricing clearer). He also had a pop at how ISPs advertise their broadband speeds.

Ed Vaizey MP said:

“We need much clearer information from providers. I, for one, would love them to get rid of this landline rental charge that they put on our bills. They put on their adverts a nice, big, juicy low price for broadband, and then an asterisk and a line saying, “By the way, you’ll have to pay £25 a month for landline rental.” All providers, whether it is Virgin, BT, Sky or whatever, should get rid of landline rental and just charge people for what they are buying: broadband, TV and a telephone service.

I hope that the Advertising Standards Authority will crack down on how providers advertise their speeds. At the moment, if only 10% of customers are receiving the advertised speed, in the eyes of the ASA that is supposed to be okay. I totally accept that the ASA does a good job—it is a great example of self-regulation—but it really needs to go further on that. In my humble opinion, at least 75% of people should be getting the speeds that the broadband providers are advertising.”

The problem with the line rental idea is how it incorrectly assumes that broadband and line rental services are always taken together with the same ISP. In reality hundreds of ISPs, both big and small alike, also sell line rental / phone and broadband services as separate products that can be mixed and matched between different providers (this is also how most ISPs buy it from their suppliers).

As such it would not be possible to force such a policy upon the whole market without creating more confusion or potentially removing consumer choice by forcing ISPs to stop offering separate phone and broadband products. If any new rules are introduced then they should only be strictly applied to bundles and consumers must still be allowed the ability to see the underlying line rental charge if they so wish.

Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and .
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