Cautionary tale

[Cassis]

We recently had problems with Club Internet broadband and telephone services; specifically, I could not access our FTP server (so could not update our website, such as it is) and the telephone did not work unless we plugged it directly into the FT wall socket.  It was established early on that the problem lay with Club Internet rather than our phone line, our PC or its settings. 

After 2 months of waiting for this to be resolved, without success, we asked Club Internet to cancel the contract as they were not providing the services we were paying for; we thought we would chance our arm and also ask for a refund for at least the telephony charges for the past 2 months.  Their reply was that unless one of their technicians wrote to us to say that the problem was beyond their competence (which it certainly seemed to be, to us at least!) then we would have to pay a penalty charge to cancel the contract (we were still in the first year contract period) and we would not get any refund for the two months when they had failed to provide a telephone service or FTP server access. 

As we obviously had no such letter, they said the only way out of the contract was if we moved house to a non-adsl area or both died.   These seemed rather extreme options so we just  decided to cut our losses, pay the penalty for cancellation and change provider.

Lesson - just because your ISP doesn't provide the service you're paying for doesn't mean they will let you out of the contract.

Phil

PS With our new ISP the FTP and telephone problems disappeared immediately.