Are there compensation payouts for French home losing internet?

Reader Question: After telling them that our internet was down at the end of July, Orange told us the service would be unavailable for just over a month. They offered to refund us on our bill for the period we had no service, but did not offer additional compensation. Is this legal? 

Customers’ rights regarding home internet services fall under the terms of the conditions of the contract they took out and more generally under consumer laws.

During a recent major outage affecting internet provider SFR, the internet connection needed to be cut for at least 48 hours – consecutively down without intermittent return of the service – for compensation, as stipulated in the firm’s general terms and conditions for landline internet. 

For mobile internet, it states refunds can be applied to if a customer loses connection for at least 10% of a given calendar month.

However, contractual terms can vary depending on the internet service provider you have, the exact contract you have signed, the type of connection you have installed, etc. 

For example, certain fibre contracts with Orange include terms and conditions stating that the company will fix the issue within 12 working days, with full missing days of service internet being deducted from a future bill as a ‘refund’ if the customer asks for this.

It does not give out compensation as standard, but states “the customer can request additional compensation if they can demonstrate that their loss is not fully covered by this refund.” 

Internet service providers also have a legal requirement under the Code de la consommation to provide an adequate service, against which the only defences are that a problem was caused by the customer, a third-party action they could do nothing about, or force majeure.

Case law shows that failure to provide a good service, if it causes proven harm (for example due to inability to work or communicate), can give rise to a right to a demand for compensatory damages.

As your internet is set to be cut for at least one calendar month, you would seem to be within your rights to request additional compensation due to the disruption. 

Contact the Orange customer service team to request compensation, explaining the impact the month’s stoppage had.

Contact the mediator 

If you are unsatisfied with the company’s response, you can contact the national mediator (médiateur des communications électroniques) regarding the dispute. 

The mediator states you should have gone through a two-step process first, contacting customer services (Orange invites customers to do this via their personal space online), then making a written complaint to the firm’s service recours (complaints department) if the initial response is unsatisfactory. 

You can then file your case through the mediator’s website. 

It is free, but must be done within one year of the issue in question. 

The mediator will try to come to an agreement with your service provider within three months of accepting your dossier, after which you have another month to accept or reject their proposal. If you reject it, you can attempt to resolve the issue at court. 

Your dossier should contain as much information about the internet outage as possible, whether from Orange itself or third-party sources. 

It is also useful to add information about how your life has been affected, for example if you are a remote worker and have been unable to work (leading to a loss of income) because of this.