Ofcom fines TalkTalk and Tiscali £3m

Ofcom has fined TalkTalk and Tiscali £3m each for mis-billing customers after they had been previously warned to get their systems in order.

Between 1 January and 1 November 2010 the companies billed 62,000 customers for services they did not received. They were then warned to fix their systems by December but billed another 3,000 customer between December and March.

TalkTalk and Tiscali have already paid £2.5m in compensation to customers for refunds and good-will payments.

Ofcom showing biting - or just publicly showing they have some teeth?

TalkTalk talks the talk

Andrew Heaney, Director of Strategy and Regulation of TalkTalk has written a blog post stating: -

* Unless we are served with a court order we will never surrender a customer’s details to rightsholders. We are the only major ISP to have taken this stance and we will maintain it.

* If we are instructed to disconnect an account due to alleged copyright infringement we will refuse to do so and tell the rightsholders we’ll see them in court.

Only 5% of MPs actually turned up for the brief debate in the House yesterday and the other important parts of the stages will now end up in the wash-up process.

TalkTalk have been very vocal against various parts of the Digital Economy Bill and will continue to fight against it and with whichever party is running the country after the general election.

Carphone Warehouse to split into TalkTalk and New Carphone Warehouse

Carphone Warehouse (CPW) the telecoms and broadband operator is to demerge its two operating units by the end of March. TalkTalk will deal with all telecoms and broadband services, while New Carphone Warehouse will deal with the retail outlets (incorporating 50% of Best Buy Europe and 47.5% of Virgin Mobile France). Both TalkTalk and New CPW will be traded on the London Stock Exchange.

Charles Dunstone will become Chairman of both companies while Dido Harding will be CEO of TalkTalk and Roger Taylor (who is current CEO of the combined entities) will become CEO of New CPW.

This should allow both companies to specialise in their particular areas and both can feed each other at arms length.

Phorm given the boot

Following on the BT's announcement that they were delaying the implementation of Phorm the targeted advertising system, TalkTalk announced they were dropping it all together. Virgin Media is considering Phorm and other systems but has not yet decided on a system to install. Phorm's share price fell 20 201p on the news.

Phorm works by snooping users' traffic and working out what sites they visit, then delivering targeted ads to those users based on their viewing habits. Phorm purchase they advertising space on remote sites and insert their ads.

Phorm has been criticised from privacy groups and there has been a bit of a public backlash.

Phorm is now concentrating on other markets such as Korea where it says trials are going well.

UK users may breath a sigh of relief, at least for a while in terms of Phorm.