But the bureau warns that customers should pay close attention to their service agreements. The agency can step in only if the ISP and the customer agree that it should be involved. Credit card companies or their affiliate banks can also help, to some extent. Credit card issuers often offer some grievance process that allows customers a venue for protesting charges they think are unfair. But in the case of ISPs, any service problems would have to be egregious to qualify for this process, Visa International spokeswoman Casey Watson said.
Contracts can be broken if one party has good reason, legal experts say.
But establishing the good ISP service vs. poor service, and at various price points, is legally ambiguous. A customer's case would be stronger if an ISP guaranteed its performance, Audley says, but that's something many are unlikely to do. In other words, if an ISP promises that 99 percent of calls will be connected, but reality is closer to 80 percent, then the consumer would have an easy out by claiming the ISP failed to deliver on the terms of the contract. Without that promise, however, an ISP might only have to show that you could connect just once to prove that it fulfilled its end of the bargain. Some states do have consumer protection laws, under which an ISP might have to provide connection speeds or open connections equivalent to the industry average, Audley added.