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Ofcom fines TalkTalk £3 million

by Scott Bicheno on 18 August 2011, 11:35

Tags: Ofcom, TalkTalk

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TalkTalk/Tiscali was fined £3 million by telecoms regulator Ofcom today after it was found that it continued to bill 3,000 of its customers incorrectly, having been told to get its house in order in November last year.

Following over 1,000 complaints, TalkTalk, which acquired Tiscali in 2009, was found to have charged over 62,000 of its customers for services they had not received. Ofcom stepped in and told it to rectify the situation by 2 December or else.

But according to the latest Ofcom announcement, while TalkTalk did make some tweaks to its CRM system, it still incorrectly billed almost 3,000 of its customers between 2 December 2010 and 4 March 2011. The consequent fine equates to a grand for each transgression.

In the original ruling TalkTalk was also required to compensate affected customers, which has cost over £2.5 million so far, so this fine more than doubled the cost of this persistent error to TalkTalk. And it could have been more, with Ofcom empowered to fine companies up to ten percent of their relevant turnover, but it was reduced to reflect the fact that some effort has been put in.

The £3 million will end up in the hands of the UK treasury. Now we just need Ofcom to find 300,000 more naughty ISPs and our debt problems are solved.

 



HEXUS Forums :: 7 Comments

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Ofcom should fine them for the abysmal bandwidth throttling that is happening on the TalkTalk network that they are telling no one about….

Everytime the school kids break up for a holiday, my speed drops by 30-50%….then ‘miraculously’ when the kids go back to school, my speeds go back to the level they should be…

It's rather obvious that they dont have enough bandwidth to serve their customers without resorting to such shoddy, underhand tactics..

Thankfully my contract expires in November, so i'm off to Virgin and their 50mb connection, and yes i know Virgin also throttle bandwidth, but at least they are upfront and honest about it, rather than the con artists at TalkTalk, who wont even acknowledge they are rationing customers connections…
Are they saying the same to VM? They also regularly get bills wrong and seem to randomly increase prices for no reason - you have to constantly keep an eye on the bill and spend ages on the phone sorting it out. Ofcom seems to overlook VM a lot of the time…
Bagpuss
Ofcom should fine them for the abysmal bandwidth throttling that is happening on the TalkTalk network that they are telling no one about….

Everytime the school kids break up for a holiday, my speed drops by 30-50%….then ‘miraculously’ when the kids go back to school, my speeds go back to the level they should be…

It's rather obvious that they dont have enough bandwidth to serve their customers without resorting to such shoddy, underhand tactics..

Thankfully my contract expires in November, so i'm off to Virgin and their 50mb connection, and yes i know Virgin also throttle bandwidth, but at least they are upfront and honest about it, rather than the con artists at TalkTalk, who wont even acknowledge they are rationing customers connections…
That drop in speed might be the extra bandwidth saturating the network at some points, i.e. nothing intentional by TalkTalk. I don't know like but it's a possibility - and it would be too expensive to run networks capable of handling peak load for every customer simultaneously.
watercooled
That drop in speed might be the extra bandwidth saturating the network at some points, i.e. nothing intentional by TalkTalk. I don't know like but it's a possibility - and it would be too expensive to run networks capable of handling peak load for every customer simultaneously.

Well, whatever the reason, for 3mths a year i have a sub 2mbit connection…and TalkTalk seem to think thats acceptable,which is why November and a 50mbit service, cant come soon enough…i could go with TalkTalk's new fibre optic service and get 30mb, but i have ZERO faith that i wont suffer from the same problem..so they've lost me as a customer.
BT infinity is also worth considering if you're FTTC enabled. :)