The latest uSwitch survey of 12,000 UK ISP consumers has revealed that 55% are satisfied with the technical support offered by their broadband company and nearly £6 million per year is spent calling help-lines. The average call was revealed to last for 17 minutes, 6 minutes of which is spent on hold. Orange and Tiscali customers are unsurprisingly the least satisfied.

Cost is also another problem, with the price of individual calls to technical support varying drastically between providers - from 0p to £1.75 per call. Broadband problems were found to take at least 2 calls to fix and just 41% of problems are sorted out first time.

Top 6 Reasons for Calling Technical Support
1. Network connection problems (37%)
2. Service interruptions (18%)
3. Wireless router problems (17%)
4. Set-up problems (8%)
5. Issues with speed (6%)
6. Other / don’t know (14%)

Thankfully it's not all bad news with two UK ISPs - O2 ( Be Broadband ) and PlusNet - receiving a good technical support quality rating of 75% and 70% respectively. Sky Broadband (BSkyB) also managed to gain 60% while everybody else was in the poor sub-60% to 40% region. We note that only the country's largest 9 ISPs were included in the survey.


However TalkTalk, which the uSwitch survey found to have kept customers waiting on hold for the longest average of 12 minutes, has disputed the study and called its findings "highly unscientific". TalkTalk claims uSwitch is using old research data that merely asked consumers to estimate how long they spent on hold.

By comparison the ISP claims that its own allegedly factual data, which times every single call to their technical support line, shows an average wait (on hold) time of just 53 seconds in September 2009. That’s a far cry from the 12 minutes stated by uSwitch; no wonder TalkTalk is mad.