Summary

  • BT's order system could push a contractual delivery date out but could not bring it back after a customer successfully challenged the extension.
  • Ofcom identified £719,000 of underpayments across 161 orders. BT paid £725,000 including interest in 2016, resolving that part of the case.

There are two ways to make a late connection look less expensive. Finish the work sooner, or move the date from which lateness is counted. Only one gets the customer connected earlier. Both can flatter a compensation bill.

BT's historical Ethernet case supplied an unusually vivid example of the difference. Its COSMOSS ordering system could move a contractual delivery date further into the future. When a customer successfully challenged the extension, the date could not be brought back. The company could change its mind without its automatic calculation changing sides.

The calendar had a financial interest

In its March 2017 decision, Ofcom found that BT had retrospectively used deemed consent to extensions to reduce compensation during 2013–14. The contracts normally allowed 30 working days, with extensions in specified circumstances. A separate failure affected payments after successful appeals: 161 orders were underpaid. BT paid the shortfall with interest, and Ofcom considered that particular failure remedied. The wider compensation scheme also had to offer wholesale customers a free independent audit.

An extension mechanism has a legitimate job. Infrastructure work encounters obstacles; a contract needs a way to handle them. But a delivery date does two jobs at once. It organises the work and establishes when the supplier starts owing money. Authority over the first becomes authority over the second.

That makes a seemingly administrative field commercially valuable. Change the date and the customer's wait can remain exactly as long while the compensable delay becomes shorter. A management report showing lower payments will not, by itself, reveal which kind of improvement has occurred. The spreadsheet can get better while the service stands still.

The buyer of a wholesale circuit has another complication: a customer of its own. An upstream date change does not supply it with another installation crew or automatically renegotiate its downstream promises. The cost of waiting survives. What changes is where that cost lands.

Congratulations. Please claim again

A complaints department can record a decision in the customer's favour. A billing department can issue a calculation based on an unchanged contractual date. Each has completed a task. The customer has acquired another one.

That handover is where the practical value of an appeal lives. A favourable decision must alter the financial calculation and reach the account. If someone has to remember to bridge the gap manually, the process depends on attention at precisely the point where the organisation is tempted to mark the matter closed.

For the buyer, the dispute then comes in instalments. First challenge the extension. Next pursue the adjustment. Finally check the credit. The supplier has divided its work among departments and quietly made the customer their unpaid coordinator.

The burden is unequal. A large buyer may have people who can pursue every difference. A smaller business has to decide whether the amount justifies the time. The same contractual promise consequently offers different practical protection, depending on how cheaply its owner can be persistent. A guarantee should not be a loyalty programme for the unusually tenacious.

BT's 2017 annual report recorded the £42 million fine and estimated wider compensation at roughly £300 million, with the precise amount dependent on discussions with affected companies. That estimate, the fine and the already corrected 161 orders belong in different columns. Combining them into an alleged unpaid balance today would create a larger number and a worse account of the case.

The eventual payment matters as much as the defect. It shows what completing a remedy requires. The decision changes the calculation; the calculation changes the bill; the customer receives the financial result. Stopping after the first step gives the customer another promise to manage.

An average cannot settle an individual invoice

Ofcom's quality-of-service decision for 2026–31 distinguishes aggregate minimum standards, transparency, non-discrimination and compensation for individual contractual failures. Those tools address different parts of the commercial bargain.

A network can improve its average installation time while a particular customer's credit remains wrong. Conversely, paying the right compensation cannot recreate the day when the connection was needed. One measure assesses operations; the other allocates the cost when an operation fails. A good overall score does not discharge a particular debt.

Buyers therefore have reason to negotiate more than a headline price and a generous-looking delay payment. They need to know who can move the date, what record survives the change and how an adverse decision reaches the bill. The person holding the calendar already has a seat in the price negotiation. The customer should be able to see what that person is doing.