Whither the Telecommunications Ombudsman? (25 September 2000) David Edmonds, the Director-General of OFTEL, has stated that, in his view, consumer complaints against telecommunications operators should be taken away from OFTEL and handled by a Telecommunications Ombudsman. It was not said at the time that an EU directive (Article 26) is forcing OFTEL's hand but, in any case, we are in favour for two reasons: OFTEL, for now, both regulates the telecommunications industry and deals with consumer complaints against the industry. The second soaks up time and resources to a frightening extent; given its current troubles, anything that focuses OFTEL on what matters in the long term is welcome. A single point of contact for complainants, with the power to impose solutions, publish rulings and exact restitution if they are not obeyed, is desperately needed. Consumer issues, if not resolved quickly, often ping-pong inconclusively between telecommunications operators, Citizens' Advice Bureaux, Trading Standards, OFTEL, MPs and whoever else. The only reliable way to force a resolution is to resort to the law, which many people are either wary of doing or unable to afford. Thinking about a Telecommunications Ombudsman brings up another question: what about regulating Internet Service Providers? At the moment the industry is unregulated - anyone can set up as an ISP - and it shows. There is an industry representative body, ISPA, but membership is voluntary and its only recourse, if a member ISP does not co-operate with it, is to threaten. Clearly much possible regulation of ISPs, such as defining minimum quality of service, is futile because, in the end, the telephone modem is not a reliable technology. However, we suggest minimum standards for how an ISP deals with its subscribers along the lines of the CAT standard in financial services or the Which? Web Trader scheme in e-commerce. For example: A basic service of Web browsing and email; Blocked services, email or Web filtering, forced proxy servers or automatic connection cutoffs mentioned; Clear explanations of metered charges and/or subscription fees using standardised terminology; Telephone charges for technical support stated; Payments to the ISP by means other than credit or debit cards; Personal details, including previous bills and, for metered charges, per-minute usage, available online via secure server; Personal details, including credit or debit card details and dialup password, maintainable by the subscriber; ISP contact details easily available, including fax, phone, email and postal addresses; Contracts, including Acceptable Use policies, clearly expressed; Online, immediate cancellation of service; Accounts not to be cut off for debt without at least contacting the subscriber and giving them an opportunity to resume payments; Planned service outages publicised a specified time in advance; Unplanned service outages publicised as soon as possible after discovery with an estimated time to recovery and regularly updated reports; Automated email of outage reports to any email address; For lengthy outages (over one day) due to the ISP, refunds of subscription fees pro-rata; A stated complaints procedure with one-off payments if, for example, a complaint is not replied to within a specified time; A 'suggestion box' with a commitment to reply to each suggestion; If technical support forums are provided, staff to undertake to participate. We are sure you can think of more; with the eventual advent of BT SurfTime and FRIACO many gross problems, such as ISPs based on worthless business models, will die off, but the fundamental problem, that business dealing with consumer is tricky, will never go away. Exactly the same rule would apply for Internet Service Provision as for mortgages or pensions; you sign up with an ISP not pledged to the minimum standards at your risk. The role of the Telecommunications Ombudsman would be to rule on complaints against ISPs taking part in the scheme: this would, finally, put ISPs under fairly light regulation. After all, the standards we suggest are common sense, but lack of common sense never stopped anyone doing anything. Defining quality of service for broadband access is a different matter as the service is 'always on' and expected to be robust. Once we have experienced such services for ourselves we will revisit the regulation of broadband ISPs.