A UK businessman who suffered weeks of disruption after signing up to Bulldog has agreed to settle out of court for a substantial sum.
Phillip Oppenheim, managing director of Cubana bar and restaurant, launched legal action against Bulldog after his business suffered a disrupted broadband service last year.
The case was due to be heard at a London court last Friday, but it is understood that Oppenheim has agreed to accept an undisclosed sum from Bulldog in compensation.
Oppenheim has demanded full disclosure of documents from Bulldog, which would have made any customer service issues experienced by the company a matter of public record. He also demanded that Emanuele Angelidis, Bulldog's chief executive, answer charges in the witness box that Bulldog kept advertising its service and signing up new customers even though it knew it was struggling to deliver new connections.
Oppenheim had agreed to move to Bulldog in July 2005. A couple of days afterwards, he heard reports that Bulldog customers were suffering problems and tried to cancel the installation. He claimed before the case that Bulldog's sales team refused to allow this.
"They said I had to speak to customer services. But even though I protested, a week later I was transferred to Bulldog," Oppenheim told ZDNet UK last month.
Once he became a Bulldog customer, Oppenheim said he was unable to get an Internet connection, and it took two weeks before he was back on a BT connection, and another two weeks before he was returned to his previous ISP.
"We were effectively off broadband for a month. It took three or four times as long to do the work," said Oppenheim.
Bulldog did not initially respond to Oppenheim's request for compensation. When he sought intervention from Ofcom, Oppenheim was offered £45 compensation by Bulldog. After attempting to get Bulldog to join in an arbitration process with CISAS, the Communications and Internet Services Adjudication Scheme, he eventually initiated court proceedings.
Bulldog was expected to rely heavily on its damage-limitation waiver, which attempts to limit its liability for loss of business or profits caused by broadband service disruption.
If the court had ruled that the damage-limitation waiver did not apply, because Oppenheim had not been allowed to cancel his subscription in July, then Bulldog could have been liable for damages.
Bulldog confirmed on Friday that the case had come to an end.
"Regarding the case with Mr Oppenheim, the case was dismissed and therefore litigation has come to an end," a Bulldog spokeswoman told ZDNet UK.
Bulldog suffered severe customer service problems last year, with many customers complaining of broadband service and billing problems.
"They can get away with things like this because most small customers, like me, can't afford a big enough law firm to get them to take interest," said one ZDNet UK reader.
If the case had been heard and Oppenheim had won, it would have been a test case and could have encouraged other dissatisfied Bulldog customers to sue.
ZDNet UK's Graeme Wearden contributed to this article.
Talkback
It is a great pity that Mr Oppenheim decided to accept a cash settlement rather than his originally stated aim to obtain full disclosure of the facts behind last year's service failures.
It is my own experience that some ISPs are far too secretive about the services that they do and do not provide.
Some months ago I left my cable telephone and broadband supplier and went back to BT after a long and protracted dispute. The problem was that some emails sent to me were consistently failing to reach my account. It took considerable effort on my part to finally get to the reason: The ISP was using a third-party blacklist to block email from certain domains. The intention is to reduce spam, but it inevitably blocks some legitimate email too, since frequently spammers and legitimate users share the same domian.
ISPs should be obliged to make full disclosure of policies such as this, so that potential customers can make an informed decision over whether the ISPs service levels will be appropriate for their needs - before signing up.
Obviously it is up to the customer to decide whether, for instance, failing to receive some legitimate email in exchange for a reduction in spam is a satisfactory situation or not.
At present, these ISPs seem to prefer the mushroom school of customer service. Keep them in the dark and drop **** on them.
I had a similar episode with bulldog, signing up and then reading the forum posts and realising my mistake. I managed with wiggle out of it though.
Reading the forums of adslguide, it sounds to me that some ambulance chasing lawyer could find enough to get on the case and try to start a class action lawsuit (or the uk equivalent).
I recently decided to change ISP for my business. I did my homework and in the course of this, I looked on the Bulldog website. I ticked the box to say I didn't want a call back. Within a few minutes, I was telephoned. I said I wasn't making my decision yet and that I would contact them if I needed to. For the next 10 days, I was called an average of 8 times a day. It put me off ever dealing with them and it looks like I made the right decision!
For Ian, the software developer, I can imagine the frustration of not getting e-mail to arrive, but surely if such a service is important, you would have your own domain, with web hosting and e-mail separate from the ISP. People complain they "cannot" switch ISP because they have a lot of friends and contacts who know their mail address at <some ISP>
Too many people put all their eggs in one basket, in my view, and then if they have a dispute about one issue, they could find everything blocked. For example, imagine someone with a business with his domain registration, website, fax-to-email, e-mail and connection using one ISP. If his account is suspended, that means s/he has the website offline, no incoming e-mail (and no incoming fax if using the ISP's service), and no internet access.
Some of this is just common sense, but so many people leave everything in the hands of one service provider, and then if it all turns upside down, they're lost. Some time back an ISP suffered a major DDoS attack, and they sold up completely - you'll find out who bought that troubled ISP by visiting www.cloud-nine.com
Last year i had problems with bulldog,my connection kept disconnecting and WAS no way better than BT,BT may be at times quite expensive,But if you want help with your connections BT are always there,bulldog rely heavily on e-mail to sort customers out and i got a few of them,but nothing changed,So i picked up the phone after 2 months with bulldog and a crap connection and called BT,They were great,even joked they have increased the connection since you was on last time and they really made me feel welcome,NO i am not going anywhere else,LEAVE BROADBAND TO BT,i was back on after 3 weeks.