CLEO Termination Fee's

[SchoolsBroadband]

Hello everyone,

 

we're moving a number of schools away from CLEO at the moment to our broadband services. All of our schools have received termination fee's from OneConnect.

 

I've read the t's and c's and it appears they can charge what ever they want.

 

I'm wondering if any schools have challenged the termination fee and have had any success of not paying them? Certainly in my opinion they don't seem to be fair. One primary school was quoted >£1500 to pick up and decommision equipment.

 

Thanks

 

Dave

[plexer]

I'll decommission each one for £500

 

Ben

[GrumbleDook]

It isn't just about decommissioning kit from schools for things like this though ... and sometimes that gets missed when chatting with schools. Without knowing the full details of the contract I would say it is hard to say something is unfair, especially as it will depend on contracted terms for partners / suppliers to complete work, costs to the organisation itself, requirements around WEEE and secure disposal of equipment, the amount of other services that are linked in with the connection (clearing out users from the Directory Service, closing down and archiving mailboxes, etc) ...

 

Exit costs are often one of the most argued about areas within contracts ...

 

I know that I am glad that I don't have to worry on this one anymore

[EX_OCL]

The main problem is the decommissioning fee is variable depending on the type of connection the school has i.e. a Radio connection would probably cost twice that of a DSL one as it would require a 2 man team to take it down.

The issue from the schools perspective is they had no choice on how they were connected and at no point were warned that their connection type would incur costs £x.

At the end of the day i would never imagine OCL would sue schools (imagine the headlines in LEP!).

If it was me i would just refuse to pay, all other ISP's would build the decom costs into the original connection fee.

[Geoff]

The main problem is the contract with the commercial supplier of the line. Depending on when it was last renewed and what type of line it is CLEO are basically passing the cost of early termination on to the school. This can get quite expensive for high speed fibre leased lines. It's best to find out when the commercial contract expires that CLEO has with with it's supplier and ask for a contract termination on or around that date. Edited December 18, 2012 by Geoff

[EX_OCL]

Almost all of the schools connections have been in place for over a year which is the minimum term for BT Fibre and copper. Radio and CLEO fibre connections have no term as they are installed and managed by OCL. The costs that schools are faced with are for staff resource costs and cherry picker hire. Granted there are a small number of sites on VM fibre which had long term contracts but these are few and far between.

[GrumbleDook]

To be fair, most RBC type connections (when put in) were done with the approach of only needing to removed them when you are upgrading to an improved service / technology. This was mainly down to the central approach from the Gov't (including cross-party groups previously working in this area) and it was how funding was delivered. Councils can't keep huge swathes of money in the pot 'just in case' ... not without having to do a lot of justification, both to the Gov't and to local tax payers. Paying a supplier up front for work that might not be done is another thing that is something that just isn't going to cut the mustard with Audit, central Gov't and local tax payers.

 

An approach some have suggested about things like this is to smooth the costs across schools. I don't know whether this was suggested in this case, but that is also something that will make some schools happy, but other schools equally as angry ("Why are we over-paying to support school x?") and the general approach (again, as directed from central Gov't) tends to be that any costs should be the real costs, transparent and final. These tend to be agreed at a very senior level within LAs (believe me ... the amount of work to get this sort of thing agreed is long, laborious, full of politics and lots of discussions with beancounters, etc!) and if a school isn't happy to pay then you can guarantee that there are already given processes to discuss and challenge this.

[Nattco]

Info from the letters -

All charges are exclusive of VAT, which will be chargeable.

· All equipment and infrastructure providing your connection and services remains the property ofLancashire County Council and will be returnable.

· Please note that all equipment including radios & poles may only be decommissioned bya One Connect Limited Engineer. This is to Health and Safety and to prevent anypotential damage to the equipment.

· If you do decommission the equipment you may be charged for this service together with anycost incurred in repairing or replacing damaged equipment.

· Charges include any unavoidable termination costs incurred, as per the termination clauses inthe CLEO terms and conditions.

· All invoices will be issued by One Connect Limited on behalf of Lancashire County Council

 

 

From letter

 

We are aware that other companies are telling schools that they have to cease theCLEO broadband service by a specific date. Unlike other providers we provide the

services on a rolling contract and currently do not require you to notify us by a specific

deadline – we do not annually renew contracts although we do issue revisions to ourterms and conditions from time to time as required and subject to giving the noticerequired. The CLEO terms and conditions only require you to give 3 months notice ofyour intention to leave and this can be given at any time.

All costs involved with set up of service were paid from Harnessing Technology grants - The successor to CLEO is now One Connect Ltd.

a joint venture Lancs. CC & BT

 

Also an interesting charge is :

 

CLEO Contract termination - Administration charge £210.00

Hardly reasonable

[buzzard]

I know this is an old thread but I don't see how they can justify that, especially if you have DSL, just unplug the DSL box and the switch and drop it off at County Hall. I've just left OCL and they are charging schools multiple times for the same thing. They're all about making money, they do harp on about being "customer focussed" but all the internal practices give you a very different impression!

[paul]

@buzzard unfortunately its not quite as simple as that, for a start there is the decommissioning of the DSLAM for those particular circuits within the exchange. On top of this there is the termination/removal of additional services schools have as part of there CLEO subscriptions e.g. Moodle.

[SimpleSi]

Very interesting thread

Basically it does cost time (and therefore money) to do the disconnect as Paul says.

 

So fair enough in todays market economy where no-one has a free pot of money to go and charge a school for it.

 

The issues then get down to contractual stipulations (and I'm thinking that all words used will be very wooly and vague as per normal ) and flat rate/average or true cost for each school.

 

Now if your 20 miles into the hill through 3 radio links, then your going to want the flat rate

 

if you live in Preston city centre with ADSL/Fibre - then you'd want the true cost.

 

Someone is going to win and someone is going to lose

 

Simon

[buzzard]

@paul OK fair enough, but we all know it takes less then 5 minutes to remove an account from the moodle servers, removing the DSLAM is again fair enough, but this should be factored in to the overall cost, I just think imposing a charge on a school who actually didn't sign a contract with OCL is a bit steep considering the massive increase in cost (in excess of 50%) in recent years. If schools are happy with that then fine pay it, I just think it's not on to charge schools time and again through the nose, lets hope post restructure (@OCL) that they manage to sort themselves out!

[GrumbleDook]

@paul OK fair enough, but we all know it takes less then 5 minutes to remove an account from the moodle servers, removing the DSLAM is again fair enough, but this should be factored in to the overall cost, I just think imposing a charge on a school who actually didn't sign a contract with OCL is a bit steep considering the massive increase in cost (in excess of 50%) in recent years. If schools are happy with that then fine pay it, I just think it's not on to charge schools time and again through the nose, lets hope post restructure (@OCL) that they manage to sort themselves out!

 

Five mins to remove an account from Moodle ... And how many accounts might a secondary school have? And what about archiving the personal data, and scheduling for destruction at a later date, including the contribution for decommissioning the hosting server at a later date?

 

I know these are the small things that could be factored into the cost of running a service (which some suppliers do) but then you have schools complaining that these are charges that might never be needed so why should they have to pay them whilst they are using the service with no plans to change?

 

Damned if you do and damned if you don't!

[buzzard]

No it's automated, you click which school is being removed and off it goes, it's not a dedicated server per school, or even a VM per school. Trust me I used to press the button!

[ticker]

Just to let other schools know that were thinking of still leaving CLEO/OCL/LCC internet provision I enquired again about the termination fees and the process of terminating and below is the response please note that their are now NO termination fees, and please feel free to read into that what you want. To me it makes me think they have accepted that schools are wanting to leave and that the current internet provision in the next 12 months from them may take on a different form if so many school are leaving .

 

'There will be no termination charges for Lancashire schools & academies, funds have been put a side, the only charge applicable will be if you want to take your Moodle data with you as explained below within the bullet points.

 

The process will be to hand in your 3 months' notice before the 31/3/14 so you need to give notice at the end of December 13.

 

• On a different note have you considered what services you will be losing, we provide a service to migrate your Moodle data to your new hosting site but there is a charge for this, I think it's around £200-£250

• You won't be able to keep your email addresses as we will no longer be hosting your emails.

• Again we won't be hosting your website, you would need to speak to your new supplier

• Basically, the C2E Broadband Bundle (CLEO) covers email, filtering, web hosting, and use of CMA and ant-virus licences.'

[Cache]

Wonder if this will apply to Cumbria schools too?

[ChrisH]

• You won't be able to keep your email addresses as we will no longer be hosting your emails.

 

That is either just intentional scaremongering or the person who wrote that should have worded it a lot better. Yes you will have to use a different email service provider, but you will be able to use your own school domain name for your email !

[ticker]

That is either just intentional scaremongering or the person who wrote that should have worded it a lot better. Yes you will have to use a different email service provider, but you will be able to use your own school domain name for your email !

 

I think its just a standard response because if he had checked, he would have discovered that we have our own internal exchange box, emails are just forward too us and the website is hosted by a third party.

[BlueD]

Ticker, can I just ask, who gave you the above information? We support primary schools and have been told that if a school leaves CLEO, and they currently use a Lancs CMS website, they will lose this completely and will have to re do their website. The above information indicates that they only need to find someone to host their existing website?

[ticker]

Ticker, can I just ask, who gave you the above information? We support primary schools and have been told that if a school leaves CLEO, and they currently use a Lancs CMS website, they will lose this completely and will have to re do their website. The above information indicates that they only need to find someone to host their existing website?

 

It was a response from OCL when I emailed ([email protected]) asking about the termination fees and how we go about terminating the internet connection.

[pcsupplies]

Anyone here terminated CLEO in Cumbria and paid termination fees??

[Paul_L]

Yes just terminated, no termination fees yet!!

 

General consensus from other schools in Cumbria that have terminated is that although they say there are, they don't materialise!

 

One school terminated well over 18 months ago and have not yet had any termination fees!