Tamin Tutoring was charged an unfairly high early cancellation fee

The Issue

Tamin Tutoring*, a small business, signed up to a NBN service and equipment bundle with BlockTel. Tamin Tutoring needed the service and equipment to conduct remote tutoring lessons via phone and video conferencing. Tamin Tutoring was assured by BlockTel that the service and equipment bundle would be suitable for online video calls and work with its existing phone number.

However, after the service and equipment was installed, Tamin Tutoring kept experiencing faults with its service. Online video calls were slow and kept dropping out and phone calls were not coming through consistently.

Tamin Tutoring told BlockTel it wanted to cancel its contract due to the faults. BlockTel told Tamin Tutoring they can cancel, but they would have to pay over $7,000 for cancelling the contract early, which was the cost of the remainder of the contract.

The Outcome

Tamin Tutoring didn’t want to pay this cancellation fee because it said the service never worked properly. After Tamin Tutoring made a complaint to our office, the parties agreed that Tamin Tutoring could exit its contract and only pay 40 per cent of the cost of the cancellation fees, which represents the time it was still able to use the service.

*Names of all parties have been changed.