Fighting the ISP and Their Auto-Renew Clause with Business Downturn
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As most of us our aware, ISPs have that lovely bit of verbage in their contracts which indicate you must provide written notice of contract termination 30 days (or in some cases more than that) before the date your contract renews.
In our case, we have a specific location that is completely shutting down. It was a subsidiary that operated under its own name but is effectively shut down. They are still doing production at their facility for a couple of months, but all production will cease at the beginning of April. This location is under contract for a single T1 that ends on 3/1/2016.
Well, we missed the date to send in our intent to terminate services / switch to month-to-month. I have contacted the ISP and let them know what we have here is a legitimate business downturn (facility shutting down). There's not a provision in their contract for this kind of thing, so it seems like a bit of a gray area. I contacted them yesterday to let them know we did not want to pay for another year of service we cannot use. We'd want to go month-to-month for March and the part of April in which we would need service.
The ISP is a local one in the Dallas / Fort Worth area which utilizes other carrier backbones for their circuits, so their contract is not as lengthy as an ATT / insert other big ISP here.
Now they're trying to rope me into using this circuit at another site instead of just letting us cancel without termination fees. I don't think management wants to pay for an additional ISP connection for insurance / just for phones / to bond to the current connection as things are running fine at other locations.
Has anyone run into this? Do we have a leg to stand on here, or are we stuck with them for another year because we missed the auto-renewal cancellation date? Their policy for termination according to the contract is that you must pay in full the charges for all remaining months of services upon termination of the contract. But our situation is different.
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@NetworkNerd said:
I have contacted the ISP and let them know what we have here is a legitimate business downturn (facility shutting down). There's not a provision in their contract for this kind of thing, so it seems like a bit of a gray area.
What's the grey area? Doesn't sound grey as described.
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@NetworkNerd said:
Has anyone run into this?
Basically if you are in the world of buying T1s, this is the kind of contractual stuff you assume is going to happen. It's just how that world works.
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@NetworkNerd said:
Their policy for termination according to the contract is that you must pay in full the charges for all remaining months of services upon termination of the contract. But our situation is different.
That right there is the gotcha.
It doesn't matter if the business is closing or moving or whatever. if you want to cancel the service early, you have to pay for the remainder of the contract.
That's all there is too it. Your management should've read the contract more thoroughly.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@NetworkNerd said:
Has anyone run into this?
Basically if you are in the world of buying T1s, this is the kind of contractual stuff you assume is going to happen. It's just how that world works.
It's not different for fiber or business coax contracts.
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@NetworkNerd said:
Do we have a leg to stand on here, or are we stuck with them for another year because we missed the auto-renewal cancellation date?
As you described it, you agreed to the auto-renewal initially and then auto-renewed. So it sounds to me like there is nothing you can do but beg. Anything that they are offering you is something that they don't have to be offering at all unless there is some additional information that we don't know about.
It's no different than if you had just bought a new service and decided not to use it, it's too late to back out.
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@NetworkNerd said:
It's not different for fiber or business coax contracts.
It is a lot of places. We never see that stuff for those, well not often. You just need better providers.
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@DustinB3403 said:
@NetworkNerd said:
Their policy for termination according to the contract is that you must pay in full the charges for all remaining months of services upon termination of the contract. But our situation is different.
That right there is the gotcha.
It doesn't matter if the business is closing or moving or whatever. if you want to cancel the service early, you have to pay for the remainder of the contract.
That's all there is too it. Your management should've read the contract more thoroughly.
And, I think you will find, that your business knew that it would be considering closing the facility some time before the ISP was contacted. I'm just guessing, but locations don't normally just shut down without warning. Management has probably been at least considering this for months or years. If they didn't consider their contracts based on that, or consider them as part of the considerations, that's missed business planning.
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@NetworkNerd said:
But our situation is different.
In what way? You didn't describe anything different. So there is something you are picturing that makes this different that we don't know about.
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My ISP contracts turn into month to month after they expire. I've never had one auto to a year or longer.
You definitely need to try to find a better provider.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@NetworkNerd said:
But our situation is different.
In what way? You didn't describe anything different. So there is something you are picturing that makes this different that we don't know about.
The entity to which this service is being billed is insolvent and is shutting its doors. That entity is different from the company that is my direct employer and was a subsidiary.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@NetworkNerd said:
It's not different for fiber or business coax contracts.
It is a lot of places. We never see that stuff for those, well not often. You just need better providers.
Had this happen to me before.
Moving from over-priced managed provider service to a commodity business ISP.
I swear, the provider cut our internet soon as they got notice we were migrating.
Kept us offline for 5 days, managment caved and signed a new contract. At the time all email was on site, so it was crippling everything that went on.
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@NetworkNerd said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@NetworkNerd said:
But our situation is different.
In what way? You didn't describe anything different. So there is something you are picturing that makes this different that we don't know about.
The entity to which this service is being billed is insolvent and is shutting its doors. That entity is different from the company that is my direct employer and was a subsidiary.
Well I see two ways to take this....
- It doesn't matter because your company is responsible for this and this has nothing to do with the situation. Or..
- If this is true then there is no issue as there is no one for the ISP to go after and you have no association with the problem.
Since we are having this discussion, I assume that 2 is not true, seems likely that 1 is.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
Kept us offline for 5 days, managment caved and signed a new contract. At the time all email was on site, so it was crippling everything that went on.
One nice thing about the US. We have extortion laws and any contract made under extorted duress is void. They would not have had to pay a penny and could have sued for big money. That's organized crime level activity there.
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@scottalanmiller said:
That's organized crime level activity there.
Would you be surprised if I told you that same ISP is still supplying their connection? Despite a 50% reduction in savings with a dozen other providers, they are too scared to try to move.
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@NetworkNerd Have you consider Molbile Hotspot? Just end the contract and find other ISP that provide 4G mobile hotspot. I once work in a site that do not have internet connection yet. The building provide us with Verizon router with a simcard for internet connection. It was crappy but better than nothing.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
@scottalanmiller said:
That's organized crime level activity there.
Would you be surprised if I told you that same ISP is still supplying their connection? Despite a 50% reduction in savings with a dozen other providers, they are too scared to try to move.
Nope, not surprised, customers who give in to extortion will always give in to it.
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Telepacific auto renews for a year term. I had to fight them on an ETF because we had their fixed wireless service, which was a nightmare, for a 3-year term. The problem was that the contract for the data was under an over-arching contract called a TAA and then one for voice (PRI) and data and they didn't line up. This is something that is super shady because I did the full 3 years for the data and canceled 45 days in advance of the contract, after we had our fiber installed and tested. Once I did that they charged us around $5500 for the remainder of the contract that was the over-arching one where we still had 9 months on.
Nested contracts are complete BS and if you can't cancel the one buried in there without it being affected by the overall one, I say screw off. I read the contract for the fixed wireless twice and had my boss read it over before I signed it way back then. It does mention the other contract but since we were only dealing with the data aspect, it seemed that it wouldn't apply because we were still using their voice services.
It took tons of time and effort to prove that the connection was horrible. I had problems almost every week with slow speeds and one time it was out for 12 hours and several more times from 15-45 minutes. They replaced all the equipment several times and that is after I found out they couldn't offer us the speed that we had originally signed for (30/30Mbps) and we ended up having to settle for 10/10Mbps because there was a legal dispute on the back-haul side where they were unable to upgrade the circuit. These are the things that you should think about when you decide to open up shop in a mostly agricultural area flanked on 3 sides by crops.
I finally had our CFO who loves to fight people over pennies call them and I didn't hear anything about it until I requested the most recent invoice from accounting and saw the credit for the full amount of the termination fee.
Switched to Impulse out of Goleta, CA for our 50/50 fiber circuit and they seem to be good so far (about 8 months in). The only problem is that they are kinda small and don't have basic things like customer support portals so everything is done via e-mail or phone and they require check payments.
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Every month or so, I check with Verizon and TimeWarner to see about an inexpensive connection for a backup and the only thing I could get is a really, really, really slow aDSL connection of 1.5Mbps/768Kbps for 80 bucks a month. TimeWarner has given me the we don't want your business price of $200,000 to build out their network. LMAO!
Like everything here, FiOS is just down the street but not at my address. Fiber was down the street for a few years and it was our neighbor that convinced our new ISP to pull it in to him and so now we have it.
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That's weird none of ours every auto renew. Heck usually they don't even expired based on time. It's a minimum money spent, when you pass that it expires. It's to make sure they cover all their build our costs for the fiber circuits.
