Refund for service fees

I had a two day outage on my broadband, and Plusnet have told me I will not be refunded for the subscription fees I paid for those two days.

I understand this does not fall within the Ofcom Automatic compensation scheme but I would have thought it reasonable for them to refund my subscription fees for a service that was unavailable during that period.

It is a residential service and you are not paying for an SLA. Some outages are to be expected. The cost to process the refund would likely be more than the refund itself so they would lose more than just the money for a couple of days outage. If you want higher levels of availability and for refunds for outage you would likely need to pay much more for a business service. The economics just aren't viable if they are giving refunds for relatively short outages - Ofcom have set the term that they believe is reasonable for paying for outages and anything short of that would likely mean that providing a service would not be viable for the ISP or prices would have to go up to cover it.

I'm pretty sure Sky used to refund service charges for outages lasting a couple of days, not sure about Plusnet. Likely when the automatic compensation scheme came in such low service charge refunds were dropped in favour of the new more substantial payments for more severe outages.

Even if Plusnet was costing you £35 a month, a two day refund would be £2.30.

As people have said, it's a residential service with no guarantees, infrequent outages are part of that.

For extended outages lasting more than a couple of days I get it, but that's what the (opted in) Ofcom automatic compensation scheme covers.

I don't think it's realistic to expect it for domestic broadband. More expensive commercial circuits that have quite tight service levels and service credit arrangements are another matter.

By way of comparison; I was madly shocked when UK Power Networks sent us a cheque in the post for the 3 day power outage we had after storm Arwen. We have many and regular shorter outages and never get a penny back. I think they were media shamed into offering compensation after the last big storms though.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

I don't think it's realistic to expect it for domestic broadband.

I guess I was spoilt by Sky in the past when they did it, during an outage they expressly told me to ring back when the issue was fixed to get a refund for the service fees during those couple of days. Not a lot of refund back granted, but it seemed fair at the time.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

I don't think it's realistic to expect it for domestic broadband. More expensive commercial circuits that have quite tight service levels and service credit arrangements are another matter.

This is true, but I try and explain to customers not to get too into the SLA credit side of things - even if you're paying £500/month for a leased line, you're only getting partial refunds up to the value of the full service. A two day outage that pays back £17 is nowhere near covering the inconvenience of having an office full of people that cannot work. I always emphasise having backup connectivity and redundancy in the network over obsessing over which provider has the best SLA.

Edited by jpm (Tue 06-Dec-22 21:27:06)

If the account was just credited to reduce the next DD, there would be no practical cost.

But yeah cheap residential service probably not going to have an automatic refund for outages.