Almost half of the UK business broadband buyers questioned in a new survey had experienced a fault where nobody seemed entirely sure who should fix it. LightSpeed Networks found that responsibility between different suppliers had been disputed or unclear for 45% of those taking part.
More than a third said responsibility for fixing faults wasn’t clearly defined. Poor handling of an outage was also the most common reason they would consider switching provider, beating both price and customer service. The survey covered 401 people responsible for buying connectivity at UK businesses.
This is a business survey, but the problem will sound familiar to plenty of households. You buy broadband from one company, the cable may belong to another and an engineer from somewhere else may arrive to repair it. Add your router and Wi-Fi to the mix, and it can become remarkably difficult to discover where a problem actually sits.
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Boston is one of the many locations Lightspeed now serves in the East of England, the East Midlands, and the West Midlands
At home, the responsibility is much clearer
Ofcom says the broadband provider you pay is responsible for getting faults fixed, even when a company such as Openreach owns the network. The provider may need Openreach, CityFibre or another network operator to carry out the repair, but arranging that is its problem rather than yours.
If your provider has joined Ofcom’s automatic compensation scheme, a complete loss of service that isn’t fixed after two full working days can also qualify for compensation. The same scheme covers missed engineer appointments and delayed starts to a new service. Again, that claim sits with your broadband provider rather than the company maintaining the cable.
LightSpeed commissioned the research and has an obvious interest in the result. It sells business broadband over its own network and promotes taking clear responsibility when something goes wrong. Its survey found that 61% of buyers preferred a provider owning and operating the connection from end to end. That suits LightSpeed’s message rather neatly, but the wider complaint about broadband buck-passing is no less real.
