Telephone companies failing to respond to customer complaints caused the most gripes made to Oftel this year.

More than 3,000 consumers complained to Oftel that telephone companies either ignored or failed to respond to their problems.

Difficulty in contacting the company or the time taken to repair a fault were also high on the list of complaints recorded between April and September.

David Edmonds, director general of telecommunications, said he hoped telephone companies would address the "significant problem".

He said: "Publishing details on consumer complaints to Oftel provides an important incentive for the companies involved to sort out their customers' problems.

"Oftel is always quick to raise issues with telephone companies when a large number of complaints indicates a significant problem with a particular company or service.

"I expect to see the telephone companies take action quickly to solve the cause of the complaints against them."

The report said 3,152 consumers complained to Oftel that their telephone company had either ignored a complaint or had failed to take action to resolve it.

In total more than 52,000 residential and business consumers made complaints on a range of issues over the six-month period.

A spokesman for BT said: "Obviously BT does take complaints very seriously and we put in an enormous amount of effort in dealing with them.

"But what the Oftel report shows is that BT customers have less to complain about than other companies and proportionately we are not in the top five companies complained about."

A spokesman for Cable and Wireless declined to comment.