My corporate headquarters — a glass-topped desk in my living room — was recently cut off from the outside world for four days.
A worker armed with a tool bag and a stool had opened the green Openreach cabinet at the end of my street, unplugged my phone line and plugged in someone else’s. The result? Instant collapse of working life.
I was in the middle of writing an email on a Friday morning when I lost my internet connection and landline simultaneously. Anyone phoning me was put through to a bewildered stranger somewhere in West Sussex.
To make matters worse, I live in an area with poor mobile reception. I had to go into the garden to contact my broadband provider and raise the alarm, and the lack of 4G, or even 3G, coverage in my area meant I couldn’t get online via my mobile either.
Broadband has become the fourth utility — as important as electricity, gas and water. I had not realised how dependent I had become until it disappeared. Yet my experience also left me feeling that new measures to compensate consumers who suffer internet outages do not go far enough.
Like millions of others in the UK, I need a reliable broadband connection to earn my living.
In 2015, the Office for National Statistics estimated that 4.2m people in Britain worked from home regularly — nearly 14 per cent of the workforce. Other studies report that half of all workers are expected to do some paid work from home by the end of 2020. Many of these, like me, will be among the UK’s 4.84m self-employed.
The biggest disaster was that I could not view my work or personal emails. Even if I had mobile reception, I would have struggled to call people. Who writes down phone numbers in a contact book, when you can click on a number in an email signature or simply Google it?
There was no Yellow Pages to consult — after more than 50 years, that stopped being printed in January (ironically, it still offers online access).
Fortunately, I had carefully filed away the paperwork containing the helpline for my broadband provider, Plusnet. Unfortunately, the only place I could get enough mobile reception to call them was standing at the bottom of the garden. Yet the customer services team needed me to unplug and reconnect various cables so they could test the line — only Mr Tickle would have arms that reached far enough.
Thankfully, my husband’s phone (on a different network) worked inside our home. Had it not, an engineer would have been called out potentially triggering a charge of £60. We were told that the fault was outside the premises, but because it was a Friday, it was unlikely that we would get the phone or internet working before midnight the following Tuesday.
Not only could I not work or communicate, I could not check any of our bank accounts unless I visited a branch or cashpoint. What if we had been hacked and our accounts plundered? Less serious, but equally frustrating, was the inability to access TV catch-up, iPlayer or Netflix.
The nearest reliable WiFi hotspot was a Starbucks in my local Sainsbury’s. How long would I be able to get away with nursing a £2.60 cappuccino while getting on with some work?
By day three, I decided to drive to my son’s flat in Brighton. He allowed me to use his WiFi; in return, I cooked him lunch. I checked my bank account, and was relieved to see that nobody had defrauded me.
By day four, I found myself standing in the garden to deal with queries about a piece I had written for the Financial Times. I was back among the shrubbery again to receive documents my son had sent via WhatsApp. They took hours to come through.
A friend suggested paying a large monthly premium for the BT Plus “keep connected” service which, in the event of an outage, will dispatch a free mini-hub small enough to fit through a letter box. However, this relies on a mobile sim card with a 4G signal which would presumably be as useless as my mobile phone.
So on Tuesday lunchtime, I was pleasantly surprised to see two Openreach vans in our street (apparently, they had called my non-working number to say they had arrived). The wires connecting my phone to a stranger’s home were unplugged. My own phone’s wires were reconnected.
Four days without broadband were disruptive, exhausting and costly. I spent more than £30 on coffee, petrol and parking, but the cost to my reputation and lost work opportunities was harder to calculate. So what compensation was I owed — if any?
In April, telecoms regulator Ofcom launched an automatic compensation scheme if broadband or landlines stop working and are not fixed within two full working days. It did so after finding that only one in seven customers who suffered problems received any form of compensation. Ofcom estimates broadband companies will pay £142m a year in compensation under the new system.
Qualifying customers will receive an initial £8, plus £8 per calendar day their service is unavailable, and £25 if an engineer fails to arrive for a scheduled appointment. This has to be paid within 30 days — usually in the form of a credit against their bill.
If the fault is with Openreach, the providers must compensate their customers and then ask Openreach to reimburse them.
Most broadband providers have signed up to this scheme (including BT, Sky, TalkTalk, Virgin Media, Vodafone, Hyperoptic and Zen Internet). EE will join next year, and my own provider Plusnet (a BT company) will do so in the coming months.
However, Saturday and Sunday are not counted as working days. In my case, the failure on Friday morning and restoration on Tuesday afternoon fell short of Ofcom’s auto compensation rules.
For now, Plusnet offers compensation on a “case-by-case basis”. The first call I made on our restored line was to its customer services team, who are sending a cheque for £38 to cover the outage. I am thankful for small mercies.
Lindsay Cook is the co-author of “Money Fight Club: Saving Money One Punch at a Time”, published by Harriman House. If you have a problem for the Money Mentor to look into, email money.mentor@ft.com
