Incorrect Callout Fee - How to Escape them?

Posted at 05/01/2017 08:12pm

An incorrect callout fee is charged to a subscriber when an ISP’s technician or representative attends your premises to perform repairs and identifies the problem location to be within your home and not on the ISP’s network.

A magical line, known as the (NBP) Network Boundary Point, separates your internal cabling and the ISP’s network along with responsibility. Kind of makes sense, when you look around at some of Australia’s big and diverse property types which might make fault isolation and re-cabling a borderline nightmare.

Generally, the first telephone socket, the grey Telstra box, an MDF (main distribution frame) or the NTD (NBN network termination device) serves as a NBP.

How much is an Incorrect Callout Fee?

If you’re with Telstra, an incorrect call out fee is $130.00 inc GST and includes the first 15 minutes of labour. Should you be with iiNet, Optus, TPG, Exetel, Dodo or the like, you’re Incorrect Callout Fee will most likely be set by the Provider, and we’ve heard rumors being around $220 inc GST, ouch.

How to avoid these nuisance fees?

It’s quite simple to avoid incorrect call out fee’s and that’s simply to find the alternate method for repair. You have 2 ways to approach the situation, and you’re in a 50/50 situation.

My recommendation to you, is weigh up the situation from an economic standpoint, and do some calculation to see if you can save a few dollars.

For instance, if you hire the ISP Technician and then issuing an incorrect call out fee, you’re out of pocket for $220. However, if you’ve hired the private telephone technician, from Mr Telco for instance, you’d only be out of pocket $189 + guarantee and issuing supporting Service Fault Reports via PDF whilst on-site, giving you peace of mind you don’t have any issues internally.

The benefits of hiring Mr Telco’s technician first, is that we personalise and provide a thorough fault investigation, giving you confidence you can go back to your ISP and submit our supporting Service Fault Report PDF.

Got an Incorrect Callout Fee – Can I escape it?

An incorrect call out charge is certainly a big enough monetary hurdle to be concerned about – and that’s not the worst part. Incurring an incorrect callout fee means, that you’ll be paying it + whatever charges a 3^rd party technician will be charging, leaving you potentially out of pocket $400+ dollars.

Remember the world’s greatest escape artist Harry Houdini? Eluding an incorrect callout fee will need similar skill. Just joking, however you’ll need some nouse.

Take yourself back to the conversation between yourself and the ISP call agent, and think how they handled your call.

As a consumer, and most of us like to think we know what’s going on, but with so much technology and lingo, there might be grounds that you didn’t have the technical knowledge or knowhow to diagnose your connection, thus should really be the responsibility of the ISP to make that call. All you are doing is feeding them information.

Also, if your ISP representative has failed to inform you about the incorrect callout fee at the time of booking a technician for you, then you should have reasonable grounds to request a refund.

The ISP call agent, should really be held accountable for making assessment of the situation with available tools and information to make the call. If they had suggested the callout without giving you alternate options or suggestion, then there maybe further grounds to try get your money back.

Next time you're in this position or requiring investigation of your home or commercial phone line or internet connection, give Mr Telco a call, where you'll be able to speak to your local licensed and experienced technician directly for free advice.