Watchdog slates JT on broadband service

Tuesday 23 September 2014

The latest CICRA survey has again slammed JT – this time for its broadband service.

The competition regulator has published the third of its surveys on telecoms this morning. The first two surveys slated JT for its landline and mobile services, but now the publicly-owned phone company is being criticised for broadband internet services.

Just 32% of JT customers surveyed were satisfied with the quality of the broadband service, compared to 50% for Newtel and 76% for Sure, and more than half of JT and Newtel customers said they were considering switching providers, mostly down to price and special offers.

CICRA director Louise Read said that she hoped Islanders would vote with their feet.

She said: “There are significant differences in the scores achieved by the different operators with Sure scoring much higher than Newtel and JT for quality of service.

“We encourage operators to use the results of the survey to identify areas where they may need to improve to better meet their customers’ needs. We also hope that customers will use this report to inform their choices when it comes to broadband service providers and the services they choose.”

CICRA have also given Islanders a list of tips to make sure that they’re getting the most out of the broadband service that they pay for – they say we should update our web browsing software and virus scanning programmes, secure our wireless networks so it’s not being tapped into for free by others, and make sure that not all of your devices are online at once.

JT CEO Graeme Millar said that they were taking steps to improve their customer service.

He said: "We fully accept we are not there yet, and that is colouring these survey results. The new billing system was absolutely essential, even if it is taking some time to get it right – it is a complex system managing 50million customer bill records every day; but by listening to this sort of feedback we are steadily improving it, so that it delivers the standards our customers rightly expect.”