BT Complaint to Ombudsman

Hi everyone,
I would welcome a sanity check on the strengths, weaknesses and practical risks of declining the Ombudsman's final decision and pursuing a county court claim concerning the contractual minimum speed and the ISP's duty to exercise reasonable care and skill under section 49 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015.
The Ombudsman did not uphold my claim for automatic compensation because it regarded the fault as intermittent dropping and retraining rather than a continuous total loss of service. It directed the ISP to reinstate a £50 goodwill offer.
I am considering declining the decision because the ISP's evidence appears to contain several technical or contractual inconsistencies. I would limit any claim to evidenced losses directly connected with the alleged breaches.
The main evidence is:
• Contractual minimum speed: The ISP's initial record states a minimum guaranteed speed of 40 Mbps. The visiting representative later recorded 34 Mbps and said the area was limited to 30 Mbps. I would rely on this as a material inconsistency and ask the ISP to explain which contractual figure applied.
• The first visit: On 28 July, the representative recorded that the NTE/master socket could not be located and that a new socket could not be tested. The replacement router was left connected through an extension and microfilter, after which the connection entered an extended loss-of-signal cycle. I would argue that the court should consider whether the visit met the section 49 standard of reasonable care and skill.
• The external fault and repair: On 30 July, Openreach located the fault outside my property and recorded damp or corrosion affecting the external cable. After the cable was replaced, the line synced at 79.999 Mbps and remained stable. This appears inconsistent with the earlier diagnosis of an internal extension fault and a 30 Mbps local limit, although further evidence may be needed to exclude every possible internal factor.
Total loss versus unusable service
The ISP told the Ombudsman that no total loss of service occurred. However, its internal log described an “unusable internet connection”, and the router records included a 0.0 dB SNR reading. I would welcome technical views on what those records establish about the nature and duration of the fault.
Earlier line performance
The ISP's 12-month graph appears to show the line operating at about 55 Mbps before the July fault. Following replacement of the external cable, the sync increased to 79.999 Mbps. This may indicate that the cable had previously limited performance, although the graph alone cannot establish when degradation began or exclude other network-management factors.
The upstream figures also improved from an automated test result of 11.0 Mbps before the repair to a current sync of 19.598 Mbps. As these readings may come from different tests and times, I would welcome views on whether they are directly comparable.
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Proposed next steps
My present plan is to decline the Ombudsman decision, send a Letter Before Claim and, if the matter remains unresolved, consider a county court money claim for a pro-rata service refund and evidenced additional mobile-data costs. I am uncertain whether compensation for my own time and inconvenience would be recoverable, particularly for network reconfiguration.
I would particularly welcome views on:
• whether declining the Ombudsman decision affects any part of a later claim;
• the evidential weight of the ISP and Openreach records;
• whether I am applying section 49 correctly;
• which losses are realistically recoverable; and
• how ISPs generally approach mediation or settlement in a modest, document-based claim.
I can provide a redacted chronology, the relevant contract wording, the full service dates, the Ombudsman's reasoning and an itemised proposed claim.
Thanks in advance!

I am assuming your information can be marshalled into a fairly watertight court claim. On the face of it, it looks as though you probably have it covered, but I think you would need to work on the presentation before putting it to a court.

So without going into the detail of the claim, the question I would ask is can you quantify your losses? What do you think is a fair settlement and how do you arrive at that figure? Behind that, my thought is that you have been offered £50 and if you reckon your losses are £65, how much effort are you willing to put in for the remaining £15?

Perhaps you could post a schedule of your losses to get a view on whether they make a reasonable claim?

Can you just confirm that my read of this is correct?

You had a first engineer visit on the 28th July, and then another one on the 30th (we're talking about the same year I assume) where a cable was replaced and the sync rate rose to almost double your guaranteed figure, with presumably no issues since.

When did you report the issue that led to the appointment on the 28th, and what was the issue that was reported?

Edited by jpm (Sun 11-Oct-26 21:21:51)

I have a first-class law degree in the law of England and Wales, but I am not a practising lawyer.

If you decline the Ombudsman's decision, then you cannot later resurrect it.

Your approach to section 49 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 ('CRA 2015') is rather optimistic. Remember that, as the claimant, you must show your claim is correct on the balance of probabilities (i.e. the burden of proof falls on you). Reasonableness allows for real-world imperfection: metallic line plant degrades, and sometimes it needs repair because it breaks completely or becomes unusably poor, for example, by a joint getting wet. I had a case of corroded crimps in an underground DP leading to a sudden drop in sync speed on Openreach VDSL2; I reported it, and it was quickly repaired. The sync speed of any DSL is best effort, but is subject to a contractual minimum downstream speed, so the pre-fault situation is, IMHO, not actionable - just because a better speed was possible by carrying out repair and maintenance does not mean that the lower speed, which was above the minimum contract speed. was a result of failure to exercise reasonable care and skill.

The engineer who said about 30Mbit/s sync speed was informally relaying their experience with the local network, not making a formal statement on behalf of their employer. Even if we take the contractual minimum speed at the higher figure of 40Mbit/s, that standard was met both pre-fault and post-repair, which limits the duration of any actionable breach of contract.

Any failure of reasonable care and skill in the first visit extended only to the second visit two days later, so really is not worth arguing about. If this is the period of 0.0 dB SNR (likely to result in a resync) and the logged "unusable internet connection", then you really don't have much of a claim considering the limited duration of this alleged breach.

I fear you may also be overestimating the recoverable damages. Contractual damages must be directly connected to the breach (the "but for" rule) and have been reasonably foreseeable by both parties at the time the contract was made (Hadley v Baxendale (1854) 156 ER 145), and are subject to your duty to mitigate loss. You are unlikely to recover consequential loss damages under a consumer broadband contract; the contract likely excludes liability for consequential loss, and even if it doesn't, consequential losses are not normally reasonably foreseeable.

Defective service damages are typically awarded on a cost of cure or difference in value basis. Cost of cure is not appropriate here as the fault has been repaired, so your damages would be limited to the difference in value between what you got and what you paid for the duration of the fault, which may be everything you paid but no more.

The s. 49 CRA 2015 element opens up additional remedies via s. 54 CRA 2015, but, at most, those additional remedies will give you no more than a price reduction to zero for a totally unusable service. You cannot recover damages more than once, so, again, your limit is the amount you paid and no more.

You will not get further mediation; the Ombudsman's decision is the only ADR you will receive, and it has met the CPR 1.1 requirement to attempt to keep the case away from court. If you send a Letter Before Claim and are prepared to issue proceedings, you gamble on whether the ISP will make an out-of-court settlement offer (because they feel the costs of defending are not worthwhile), defend, or do nothing and allow you to apply for summary judgment.

Given that your claim appears to have very low value, that you would risk losing a court fee if you issued proceedings, and that the Ombudsman's offer of £50 is on the table, I'd take the £50 and not waste any more effort on this.

Edited by David_W2 (Mon 12-Oct-26 16:29:55)

Read your comments. After complaining to the Energy Ombudsman and the ICO about my utility supplier and their "deceit", I pursued a Small Claims Court case and would not recommend, especially given the earlier comments below. These are listed companies with big pockets and if they do not defend (most possible unlikely but you can check the judgements), you can obtain summary judgement. If they defend, you will be facing a time delay and hassle of the legal arguments which will likely involve more time and costs and you have no control over when this will ever be heard! If you accept the Ombudsman decision, you are precluded from taking further private action ("res judicata") and if you do not, then there is no referral to BT or any licensing authority and the complaint is then swept under the carpet unless you pursue privately. The cards are unfortunately stacked against the consumer (in my humble opinion having experienced what happens). BT have all the data and can produce endless explanations. All Ombudsman services are there to give a derisory element of compensation which in my opinion is very poor. Should you proceed, unlikely to obtain any recompense for your own time and any amounts claimed have to be substantiated.





happens!)

Are you for real?

You had a fault and it was fixed. Take the fifty quid.