In last week’s column, I wrote about leaving service contracts and how navigating an exit from a provider can be tricky at times.
Aisling from Cork had already been in touch with me to say she was struggling to break up with her broadband provider. Her experience is unusual because most broadband providers, by nature of the services they provide, are extremely easy to get in contact with.
Pre-covid times, Aisling had signed up to C Tek, based in the greater Cork and Waterford area. The company offered an increase in bandwidth speeds and was budget friendly, costing her just €15 per month on top of her regular subscription.
She was happy with the service and had no complaints until earlier this year, when she experienced a severe drop in internet speed. Her first step was to contact C Tek using both the telephone number and the email address provided to her on their invoices. It was then, that she realised her issue with internet speeds may have been indicating a bigger problem.
On ringing the telephone number, an automatic voice message answers saying: “Thank you for calling C Tek. Due to the high number of customers migrating to the National Broadband System, we are no longer able to offer a telephone support service. Please email for all enquiries.”
The emails to the company go unanswered and their website has been suspended. The invoices Aisling has been receiving arrive by email via Stripe, and the return address is the defunct email address. She simply has no way of getting in touch with the company concerned and they continue to take payments via visa debit from her card.
In the immortal words of Liam Neeson in Taken, I have a certain set of skills and was able to do some background investigation into her issue.
National Broadband Ireland has a list of approved broadband service providers across the Irish network. C Tek is not on that list.
The company website is registered to Chris Tyler, also from the Cork area, who marked themselves on LinkedIn as ceasing working as a freelance network engineer for C Tek in May 2025. Chris has marked himself on LinkedIn as working for another company entirely since December 2023. From what I can determine, the website itself has been suspended since 2022 and, although it is still a registered domain, it will expire in mid-September 2025.
While all of this is no practical help to our reader Aisling, it certainly points to a business that may have been struggling for quite some time prior to her issue.
The broadband speeds she has been experiencing means she cannot work from home and that is not ideal at all.
According to the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC), a service provider has legal obligations to its customers. Namely, they must provide the service that works in the way they said, for a reasonable price — when it is not agreed in advance — and that matches any advertisement or information you may have seen.
If a consumer has an issue with a service, they should contact the provider in writing with their complaints and/or concerns. Customers should always explain their issue to the provider first and ask that they respond within a reasonable amount of time. In most cases, that would be 14 days or 10 working days.
For Aisling to extricate herself from this service, her first step has been to contact her bank and stop the payments to C Tek. As she has a record of all her attempts to get in touch with them, the bank was happy to do this and since early July, she is no longer paying for something she can’t use.
Since she stopped her Visa debit payments, the broadband provider has continued to send her payment reminders and invoices via Stripe. They have also attempted to make three payments in the last fortnight which have been blocked by the bank. However, it’s entirely possible this is an automatic function of the company account, as she has yet to be contacted by email, phone, or post by any individual on their behalf.
In the meantime, Aisling has used the National Broadband Ireland website — nbi.ie — to select an alternative provider and should be up and running with much better internet speeds shortly.
If you’ve got a recent issue with leaving a contract that you’d like me to investigate, please get in touch below.
This is a textbook example of how to deal with a company that is not providing a promised service to you. Keep a record of any phone calls you make by jotting down the numbers, time you called, and how long you waited on hold.
Set reminders in your diary for 7 and 14 days after you have sent an email to follow up on your complaint. After all your efforts, if you haven’t been able to resolve your issue, you can ask the company for a final response.
Once you have a final response, you can take your complaint to the relevant supervising body; but I recommend your first step should be to contact the CCPC for advice.