Some broadband customers paying the price for technical support

A recent report has shown that many broadband and Internet users in the UK are paying a small fortune simply to get technical support from their Internet Service Provider.

As a nation the UK has become so reliant on the Internet for both home and business use that we often find ourselves with a real problem if we are unable to get online due to some technical problem. The good news is that most of us can get the problem quickly resolved by contacting the technical support team from the Internet Service Provider, which often results in experts talking you through resolving the problem of fixing the issue remotely.

However, the bad news is that over recent years more and more Internet Service Providers have started charging for calls to their technical support teams, and this can make it very expensive for some broadband and Internet users to get their technical problems resolved. Reports suggest that there are still a few ISPs that have free-phone numbers enabling customers to get support with paying through the nose, but many others now have premium rate numbers for their technical support lines.

Tesco is one of the providers that charged premium rates for technical calls, but is looking to change this. An official from Tesco said: “The cost of calls to Tesco broadband technical support is something we’ve been looking at and listening to customer feedback on. As a result we’ll continue to provide a very high quality of technical expertise to all our broadband customers but calls will now be charged at a local rate. We’ll be contacting all our customers as soon as possible to let them know about the change in price.”

An official from the consumer campaign group, Which?, said: “Some companies are using higher-cost numbers at their customers’ expense. If other companies can offer a freephone number, why can’t they all?”