{"id":10915,"date":"2016-01-11T11:17:05","date_gmt":"2016-01-11T11:17:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ispreview.co.uk\/?p=10915"},"modified":"2016-01-11T14:43:15","modified_gmt":"2016-01-11T14:43:15","slug":"uk-isp-sky-broadband-extends-deadline-for-sky-talk-package-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ispreview.co.uk\/index.php\/2016\/01\/uk-isp-sky-broadband-extends-deadline-for-sky-talk-package-change.html","title":{"rendered":"Ofcom Pressure – UK ISP Sky Broadband Extends Sky Talk Deadline"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last year’s move by Sky Broadband<\/a> to swap their existing Sky Talk (voice calls) customers, including those who received free calls at no extra cost, on to a new paid package (presumed consent) did not go down well with everybody (here<\/a>). But a little pressure from Ofcom<\/a> appears to have helped.<\/p>\n

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The change was first revealed in October 2015 (here<\/a>), although existing customers still had to do a bit of digging in order to uncover the full details (Sky’s official announcement<\/a> page made no mention of the extra \u00a34 charge). In fairness the writing had been on the wall since July 2015’s closure of the old Sky Talk<\/strong> packages (here<\/a>), which at the time only affected new subscribers.<\/p>\n

The changes were due to be implemented for all existing customers by the end of December 2015, although as feared some of Sky’s customers were caught out by this and they promptly complained to the national telecoms regulator, Ofcom<\/a>. It’s worth noting that customers did have the option to downgrade Sky Talk and avoid the charge, but not everybody was aware.<\/p>\n

At that point Ofcom<\/a> took a closer look as part of its monitoring programme for General Condition 9<\/a><\/strong> (GC9), which relates to the fairness of consumer contracts. As a result of that Ofcom got in contact with Sky and managed to agree a softening of the operator\u2019s position, albeit not by much.<\/p>\n

Ofcom’s Statement<\/strong><\/p>\n

Some customers complained to Ofcom about the changes. Ofcom contacted Sky and it has now agreed to give any customer who is unhappy with the changes until 31 January 2016 to:<\/p>\n