TIO Annual Report 2003/04

Case Studies

Faults/Technical Support

The Complaint:

The complainant claimed to have experienced frequent dropouts on his dialup service over eight months. He said he complained many times to his ISP, which had refused to help. It was found that the complainant was using software for which the ISP did not offer technical support. The ISP did not suggest that the software caused the dropouts. Rather, as the ISP did not train its staff in the product, it could not offer worthwhile assistance to its customer in using different settings on his software, to try to fix the problem.

TIO Response:

The evidence supplied by the ISP indicated that the usage of the service had not decreased because of the dropouts. The TIO declined to investigate the matter further, because the ISP had agreed to credit three months of access fees as a goodwill gesture as well as issue a credit for the cost of the call dropouts.

The Outcome:

The TIO believed that this was a reasonable outcome in all of the circumstances and was not in a position to determine that the ISP should support privately purchased software.