Openreach Refund £14m to UK ISPs for Underpaying Compensation

Openreach (BT) has today confirmed that a mistake in compensation payments (forms part of a Service Level Guarantee) for their high capacity 1-10Gbps Ethernet Backhaul Direct (EBD) product means they will have to refund UK communications providers (ISPs) around £14 million.

The EBD product typically comes attached to strict automated Service Level Agreements (SLA), which are designed to ensure that there is “reasonable compensation” if Openreach fails to deliver on their network availability promises. In this case the operator identified that they had been “underpaying service level guarantee compensation” for EBD since all the way back in October 2016.

In a statement the operator told ISPreview.co.uk: “We recently identified an issue which meant we had underpaid Service Level Guarantee payments for our Ethernet Backhaul Direct product. We have informed Ofcom and apologised to those wholesale customers who were affected and we’re now in the process of refunding them in full. We’ve also reviewed our processes to stop this from happening again.” The regulator does have a tendency to impose fines for such mistakes.

ISPreview.co.uk understands that some of the issue may stem from human error. New compliance controls are understood to have been implemented in order to ensure that the problem doesn’t reoccur.