BT HOME HIGHWAY

Early day motion 663, tabled 15 January 2002 by Harry Barnes (Labour). Signed by 22 members.

That this House is deeply concerned that the BT Home Highway fails to operate any automatic mechanisms to ensure that abnormal and dramatically changing usages of their facilities are quickly drawn to the attention of recently established customers, which would give warned customers an immediate opportunity to check to ensure that no errors had crept into their usage of the system; believes that the failure to operate an automatic checking system casts doubts upon the technological standing of the Home Highway system; notes that in one case a family ran up a phone bill of well over ú4,000 in a period from Christmas morning to 21st February when in their initial absence a computer attempted to log-on to the Home Highway regularly at intervals of around a second, a problem that was not brought to light until BT submitted their bill, whilst a subsequent itemised bill ran to 1,600 pages, and believes the bill should have been cancelled and that people would be well advised not to join the BT Home Highway as new customers until an automatic fail-safe arrangement is introduced, whilst current customers should be vigilant in checking against any similar costly problem.

Signatures by party: Labour 17, Labour/Co-operative 3, UUP 2.