How much do you pay when you phone a technical advice line for help with your broadband? If you’re like most people, you won’t know.

This is either a) because you’ve got too much on your mind trying to sort out your internet gremlins, or b) because you’ve incorrectly assumed that because telephone calls via your broadband are free, the same applies to technical advice calls.

Well, according to a new survey customers are paying as much as £14.50 for a single telephone support call. Orange, one of the pioneers of so-called “free broadband” services, charges customers up to 50p a minute to talk to support staff. That earns the company an average £5.56 per support call, and it receives about a million calls a year. This is according to a survey of almost 11,000 broadband users from the comparison service uSwitch.

In July, Virgin Media, the country’s second-biggest broadband provider after BT, raised the cost of its technical support lines from a local rate call to 25p per minute. Toucan charges its customers 30p per minute. BT charges 2p per minute.

Despite the premium prices, only four in 10 Orange broadband customers are satisfied with the technical support they received – findings echoed by figures from Moneysupermarket.com, which ranks Orange as one of the worst providers for technical support, scoring an average of 2.6 out of 10 in its customer reviews.

“What users don’t realise is that providers are often charging them extortionate phone rates to resolve technical problems,” says Jason Lloyd, head of broadband at Moneysupermarket.

Compounding the problem is the fact that only four out of 10 customers surveyed by uSwitch had their glitch sorted out on the first call, with customers having to ring back as many as three times to fix the same breakdown. And in an average 17-minute support call, six of those minutes are spent on hold waiting to speak to a technician.

Steve Weller, uSwitch’s head of communication services, says: “The only company [of Britain’s top 10 providers] that doesn’t charge on hold is Orange, and that’s only because they charge at premium rate, and premium rate regulations state that you’re not allowed to charge customers on hold.”

Carphone Warehouse’s TalkTalk doesn’t charge customers to talk to its operatives, though the company had the lowest support approval rating in the uSwitch survey, with just 37% customer satisfaction.

The solution is probably to bypass the big players and opt for the little guys. According to Moneysupermarket, a little-known company called Be Broadband is currently netting the best customer approval ratings.

Explore Personal Tech

• InGear