The UK Telecom regulator Ofcom imposed a fine of £30,000 on the UK broadband provider Prodigy Internet Ltd for its continuous non-compliance with some of the norms of Ofcom - GC22 and GC14.7 and for not providing specific information that Ofcom demanded. 

Following the non-compliance of Prodigy with new migration norms for a long time, the regulator has issued a notice under section 135 of the Communications Act 2003 (‘the Act') which instructs all ISPs to provide the specified information without fail. It seems that Prodigy also ignored this notice which made Ofcom to issue a notification under section 138 of the Act by the end of May this year. However, Prodigy did not respond to this notification too. This prompted the regulator to take this ultimate step of fining Prodigy.

Ofcom has implemented new norms that govern migration procedure and related issues six months ago. All the broadband suppliers in UK were instructed by Ofcom to comply with the new norms and upon breach of the norms, Ofcom had taken steps to deal the ISPs who fail to take notice of Ofcom’s instructions. As a result, Ofcom had received just 250 complaints per week in August when compared with 480 complaints per week received in March. Recently, Ofcom has decided to continue the implementation of GC22 (which deals with issues related to migration) for the next six months. This norm instructs all the ISPs to issue MAC to the customers within five working days upon request.

As far as Prodigy is concerned, Ofcom is further looking into the activities of the ISP.