Posted: 13th Sep, 2006 By: MarkJ
BT has issued a complaint to Ofcom concerning rival ISP Unicom, which it accuses of trying to prevent customers from leaving. Interestingly BT was recently accused by The Carphone Warehouse of doing something similar:
Unicom responds to such notification by ringing the customer to check if they really want to switch away from Unicom, and BT claims the smaller provider then takes this further by trying to convince the customers to change their minds. If true, this would constitute a breach of Internet providers' "
conditions of entitlement" as "misuse of certain information in the context of Network Access Arrangements".
However, the case closely echoes another complaint brought in July by Carphone Warehouse against BT, and Unicom's chief executive Simon Clarke has suggested that this previous case is the motivation behind BT's new allegations. "
Following Carphone Warehouse's complaint, BT wishes to have it out in the open what the industry is doing. We say it is not a genuine complaint BT never contacted us about it prior to going to Ofcom," he claimed.
A spokesperson for BT told
ZDNet UK that investigations by the company had uncovered numerous complaints by Unicom customers who had wished to leave, claiming that their transfer orders had been cancelled by Unicom without their knowledge.
Cancelling the cancellation, now that's one underhand method we haven't seen in awhile. Some ISP's don't even bother to pass the cancellation through or have no customer support to action it with in the first place. More @
ZDNet.