Internet or TV down in Belgium: what to do before calling

Before you call, seven checks take about twenty minutes and clear half of all outages. They mostly save money: if the technician concludes that the fault sat in your own installation, the visit is billed at €59 to €85 depending on the network. And the clock on your legal compensation only starts when you report the problem.

A bundle goes down in one block. No internet, no television, no landline, and usually on a Sunday evening. The reflex is to grab the phone straight away. The right order is the opposite.

Which service went down, and which one is still alive?

The first check needs no cable at all. Go through the contract service by service: internet, television, landline, mobile. The pattern already names the culprit.

Everything dead at once, mobile included? Look at the fuse box before blaming the operator. Internet, television and landline out while the mobile still works? The fault sits on the modem or upstream of it, and that is the only case where the network is a serious suspect.

Television black but internet up? The set-top box or its cable, never the network. Internet answering over Ethernet but not over Wi-Fi? The Wi-Fi, and again nothing that justifies a call-out.

That triage costs sixty seconds. It decides everything else.

Is there an outage in your street?

Second reflex, still without touching the hardware. Open your operator's app or status page: Proximus shows incidents in your area inside MyProximus, Telenet publishes a page listing works under way in your neighbourhood, Orange and VOO point to their online support. Roadworks announced the day before explain a lot of Sunday evenings.

The second test beats every other one. Ask a neighbour on the same network. If they are cut off too, your installation is out of the picture, and a technician who travels for nothing will be charged to you.

Seven steps, twenty minutes, and €85 avoided

Once the triage is done, the procedure is short and runs in this order. Reversing it achieves nothing: powering the set-top box back up before the modem has finished booting produces a perfectly normal black screen.

Sequence and timings built from the procedures published by Telenet and Proximus, checked on 9 September 2026. Telenet notes that a modem takes up to two minutes to boot and that a blinking front light means a software update is running: in that case, do not unplug anything.

What does a technician cost when the fault is yours?

Here is the figure nobody puts forward, and it is the one that justifies the previous twenty minutes. Clearing a fault is free as long as the cause sits on the network, up to and including the connection point of the house. Beyond that point, the indoor installation belongs to you, and so does the bill.

Published price lists checked on 9 September 2026: Telenet support page on faults, Orange Belgium page on the technician's visit, Proximus document "Frais spécifiques et indemnités" for residential customers. All amounts include VAT.

Three readings come out of that table. The base fee sits in a narrow band, €59 to €85, so the operator barely changes the total. The time-slot surcharge, on the other hand, goes everywhere: €5 for a Saturday at Telenet, €136 outside normal hours at Proximus, a ratio of 1 to 27 for the same inconvenience. And the last column is the trap, because it does not even depend on the fault.

Should you call straight away, and at what time?

Yes, call early, but not at any hour. At Telenet, appointments run Monday to Saturday across four slots, 8 am to 1 pm, 10 am to 2.30 pm, 12.30 pm to 6 pm, and 5 pm to 8 pm with a surcharge and never on Saturday. Proximus commits, on a classic fixed line, to clearing the fault before the end of the working day following the report, its normal hours running Monday to Friday from 8 am to 4.30 pm.

In practice: the 7 pm appointment will cost you between €15 and €136 more depending on the network, for an identical service. Take the morning slot.

Eight hours of total interruption open a payment

Since 1 November 2024, any subscriber whose telecoms service has been completely interrupted for at least eight consecutive hours is entitled to compensation from the operator. The scale is set by law and is not negotiable: €1 after eight hours, another €1 after twenty-four hours, then €0.50 per extra day.

The word that matters is "total". A speed that crawls, a Wi-Fi signal that drops, a television that pixelates while the internet keeps running: none of that opens any right. Our article on real speed against advertised speed covers that case, which follows a different procedure.

The floor is the interesting part for a multi-service household, and nobody frames it that way. The subscriber is entitled to a minimum of one thirtieth of the monthly subscription fee as soon as that amount exceeds the scale. On a bundle billed at €90 a month, that comes to €3.00, three times the entry amount. On an internet-only subscription at €45, €1.50. The more services the contract groups, the harder the floor bites.

Why does the report change the amount?

Because the right only runs from eight hours after the operator became aware of the interruption. Not eight hours after the outage: eight hours after the report.

Take the most common case. The services go quiet on Sunday at 7 pm, nobody calls, the ticket is opened on Monday at 9 am, the technician restores service at 3 pm. The household spent twenty hours with nothing. Against the scale, the known interruption lasted six hours, and the compensation is zero. Fourteen hours were wiped out for want of a phone call.

Five records to keep during the outage, and only one of them is optional:

• The exact time the services went quiet, noted on your phone.
• The time you reported it to the operator, which is what really starts the legal clock.
• The ticket or file number, without which nothing can be verified afterwards.
• The list of services affected, one by one, internet, television, landline, mobile.
• The time service came back, including if it returns on its own during the night.

One useful note: an outage that happens during a change of operator falls under an entirely different scale, set out in our article on Easy Switch and service downtime.

And if the operator pays nothing?

A written complaint first, always. Date and time of the report, ticket number, total length of the outage: without those pieces, the next step is inadmissible. The Telecommunications Ombudsman Service then takes over, free of charge, and the Belgian consumer organisation documented this right to compensation as soon as it came into force. The full procedure is in our guide to disputing a telecom bill.