Two months ago, our internet went down. EE arranged an engineer appointment with its partner firm Qube within 48 hours, but the visit was cancelled on the day. Another appointment was made for two days after that, but the engineer was unable to fix the problem. A week after the problem, an Openreach engineer attended and restored our service. EE’s compensation policy, in the event of total loss of service, entitles us to £48.80 plus £30.49 for a late-notice appointment cancellation. However, EE only paid £18.66. I was told compensation for cancelled appointments only applies to Openreach engineers and I wasn’t entitled to compensation for the seven-day delay because it recorded that there was no fault.
HT, Hook, Hampshire
The auto-compensation scheme is not goodwill on the part of EE; it’s a requirement by regulator Ofcom. Under the rules, customers are entitled to daily payments of £9.76 if their service is not restored within two working days and last-minute cancellations require a £30.49 payout.
EE initially tried the same excuse on me. It claimed compensation is not payable until the fault is passed to Openreach which, in your case, did not happen for five days. This is baloney. Next it tried to argue that since faults within a home are excluded from payouts under Ofcom rules, the compensation clock did not start ticking until Openreach had confirmed it was a wider network issue. More baloney. If a fault is confirmed outside the home, daily compensation entitlement is backdated to 48 hours after it was reported.
In April, I reported how EE/BT ducked and weaved to avoid paying a customer whose installation had been delayed five months. Only when I sought confirmation from Ofcom that EE was rewriting the rules did the company pay up.
It admits it initially misdiagnosed the problem as an internal fault that did not qualify for payment. It says: “We are sorry HT was unhappy with the compensation offered. We have offered a goodwill gesture to resolve the complaint.” By which it means the rest of the auto-compensation you were due.
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