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BT, phone home (not the US)

Published: 13:10 18 Jan 2017 GMT

Mobile phone user

Compared to some of the fines dished out to banks, a £2.7mln fine from telecoms regulator Ofcom to mobile phone network operator EE is small beer.

EE is owned by BT Group PLC (LON:BT.A), so the company can easily afford it, but the reputational damage might hurt.

The fine came after an investigation determined that EE had overcharged almost 40,000 customers by £250,000 in aggregate.

EE customers in the EU who had called the company’s 150 customer services number were charged the US “roaming” rate of 120p a minute, rather than the correct rate of 19p.

Worse still, the company failed to most of the affected customers until Ofcom intervened.

“EE didn’t take enough care to ensure that its customers were billed accurately. This ended up costing customers thousands of pounds, which is completely unacceptable,” said Lindsey Fussell, Ofcom’s consumer group director.

EE has now reimbursed those customers it can track down, while an equivalent amount of money owed to those customers it cannot contact has been made to charity.

It has also promised to put procedures in place to prevent a recurrence.

Customers posting on Twitter are about as sympathetic as one would expect.

As the bid battle for elevated platform s provider Lavendon Group plc (LON:LVD) rages on, we were speculating in the office how window-cleaning is performed on very tall buildings.

Even Lavendon’s “cherry-pickers” would probably struggle to reach the top of a building such as The Shard in London, and the consensus verdict was that abseiling window cleaners were used.

New York is the spiritual home of the skyscraper, and with the New York Wheel currently being built (to a height of 630 feet) it occurs to me that if they build it right next to a particularly tall building and give everyone a bit of shammy leather before they get on it, you could save a few bob on window cleaning.

Read Challenger’s New York observation wheel making “fantastic” progress

More seriously, the New York Wheel has been named one of the 13 coolest projects of 2016 by web site constructionjunkie.com.

The wheel is cool, but a Ripping Yarns-style full-scale replica of the Titanic may be cooler still.

Mark Zuckerberg, the geeky chief executive of Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) was called to the witness stand in a Dallas federal court yesterday to testify in a court case over the company’s Oculus virtual reality (VR) unit.

Surely, in this day and age, he did not need to turn up in person?

Just have everyone pop the old VR helmet on and, hey presto, everyone is in the same room … even if they are not on the same page.

Computer games publisher ZeniMax Media Inc is alleging that Oculus ripped off its intellectual property to develop the VR system.

Lastly, some good news for commuters in Sarf Lundun … er … south London.

Aslef, the train drivers’ union, has suspended three days of strikes planned for next week as negotiations between the union and Southern Rail are set to resume.

Unfortunately for those travelling in from south of the river, the RMT union is still going ahead with the strike by train guards on Monday, which means Southern will not be able to run a full timetable before Tuesday.

Time to widen Ofcom’s powers, perhaps, to encompass the railways sector?

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