Complaints

(1) Providers of publicly available telecommunications services, other than number-independent interpersonal telecommunications services or transmission services used for the provision of machine-to-machine communication services, are required to publish information on the complaints procedures they provide, in a format accessible to end users with disabilities. Providers must, in particular, give information on the average time taken to process end users' complaints, and the average time taken to process complaints relating to service quality, contract performance, and billing. Providers must make clear how end users can access these procedures. The procedures must take into account the interests of end users with disabilities by being provided in an accessible format.
(2) End users may raise an objection to an invoice issued, within eight weeks of its receipt, or to a debit of prepaid credit. In the case of an objection, the provider must itemise the connection traffic for the end user as evidence of charges, broken down by individual connection data, and carry out a technical review, unless the objection is demonstrably not attributable to a technical defect. In itemising the connection traffic, the provider must safeguard the data protection interests of any other users of the connection.
(3) The end user may, within the objection period, require that the evidence of charges and the results of the technical review be provided. Where they are not provided within eight weeks of an objection, any claims for default arising up to that point lapse. The claim asserted by way of the invoice falls due upon the provision requested. The Federal Network Agency publishes which procedures are suitable for carrying out the technical review.
(4) Insofar as traffic data are not stored for technical reasons, or, where no objections have been raised, stored data have been deleted after expiry of the period laid down in subsection (2), first sentence, or agreed with the provider, or pursuant to legal obligations, the provider bears neither a burden of proof for the connection services provided nor the duty to provide information under subsection (2) for the individual connections. The first sentence applies correspondingly insofar as the end user has, after a clearly recognisable notice of the consequences under the first sentence, requested that traffic data be deleted or not stored.
(5) It is for the provider of publicly available telecommunications services to prove that it provided the telecommunications service or access to the telecommunications network technically free of fault up to the handover point at which network access is provided to the end user. Where the technical review under subsection (2) reveals defects that may have affected the calculation of the disputed charge to the end user's detriment, or where the technical review is completed later than two months after the end user's objection, it is rebuttably presumed that the connection traffic invoiced by the respective provider of publicly available telecommunications services was incorrectly determined.
(6) Insofar as the end user proves that use of the provider's services cannot be attributed to them, the provider has no claim to payment against the end user. The claim also does not arise insofar as facts justify the assumption that third parties, through unauthorised alterations to public telecommunications networks, influenced the connection charge invoiced.