EE Cuts Contract Buyout to £200 for New UK Broadband Customers
New customers looking to take a home broadband package from EE may like to know that the ISP has reduced the value of the Contract Buyout (i.e. Switching Credits) they offer from “up to” £300 to £200, except if you take both broadband and a TV bundle in which case the original value is maintained.
Contract buyouts are essentially a special offer that is intended to help customers, those who choose to switch to EE’s fixed line service, to cover some or all of the Early Termination Charges (ETC) that may have been levelled against them by the losing ISP (e.g. general exit fees or cancelling your old contract early, before it has finished, often attracts ETCs).
The value of the buyout will typically vary between packages, hence why we use the wording “up to” above. Previously EE’s broadband service offered a contract buyout worth up to £300, but as of today this has been reduced to £200 for those only switching to broadband (but it remains at £300 if you take a broadband and TV bundle).
Advertisement
The new value could be said to more closely match the sort of buyouts being offered by many rival providers and also adds a greater incentive for those who may also wish to bundle EE’s TV service. On the other hand, Virgin Media did recently increase their buyout from £250 and now maxes out at up to £300, so some providers are still a fair bit above the £200 level, at least for a short while (the buyout values do change from time to time).
In order to benefit new customers will need to:
- Order and activate EE Broadband.
- Email their paid final bill to [email protected] within 4 months of activation.
- Ensure their EE order number is included and the bill clearly shows any early termination charges.
- Claims will continue to be validated before the credit is applied to the customer’s EE account.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
Advertisement
Leave a Reply
Privacy Notice: Please note that news comments are anonymous, which means that we do NOT require you to enter any real personal details to post a message and display names can be almost anything you like (provided they do not contain offensive language or impersonate a real person's legal name). By clicking to submit a post you agree to storing your entries for comment content, display name, IP and email in our database, for as long as the post remains live.
Only the submitted name and comment will be displayed in public, while the rest will be kept private (we will never share this outside of ISPreview, regardless of whether the data is real or fake). This comment system uses submitted IP, email and website address data to spot abuse and spammers. All data is transferred via an encrypted (https secure) session.
Is the profit margin quite high for an ISP? If some are willing to buy a customer out with a few hundred quid then obviously they have to get that money back somehow right?
As always, depends how you slice it, but the Q1 EBITDA Profit Margin of BT consumer which includes BT, EE and Plusnet was apparently 26.43%.
The *net* profit margin for BT Group as a whole was more like 5.5%. But that includes a lot of other stuff.
Suffice it to say if they are willing to pay that much to acquire youp, they estimate that they will on average make at least that much profit from you over the course of your time with them. The cancellation fees help cover the potential loss side of that equation.
Did they or will they pay a dividend to shareholders?
What bonuses did they pay staff?
Perhaps some of that saved money could be used to abolish their new activation fee?
EE had people door knocking on the estate I live on the other week trying to get new fibre broadband customers.
Issue with EE / BT / Plusnet is it then forces you to deal with Openreach & that’s where the problems start.
What a weird comment. Have you got any idea of the scale of the organisation or are you so deeply in love with your job at Virgin Media? – If you only have Openreach available in your area (you’d be amazed how many people this is) – They’re fine. I’ve had fibre for 3 yrs via Openreach and provided by Vodafone. No problems, downtime or loss of service at all. Remember, they’re an infrastructure platform provider, not a service provider.
What about BT?
I can only speak as I find but the few times I have had to deal with Openreach they have been excellent.
Reduced contract buyout payments and increased activation fees. BT Group must be happy with their current signup performance.
@ex-techie
I was a long term 10+ years Plusnet FTTC customer, I attempted to upgrade to FTTP last year & that’s where it all went wrong.
Openreach make appointment for site survey, then they turned up 2 weeks early when nobody was home
Anyway the plan for FTTP cable dig through front garden approved by myself, Openreach make appointment for outside works. On the day Openreach failed to show up but told Plusnet that all outside works where complete & to arrange appointment for ONT install with go live date.
I questioned this with Plusnet, they questioned it with Openreach, Openreach came back with ” second site survey required as it seems no outside works have been carried out ”
I was annoyed after nearly 3 months nothing was installed, cancelled the upgrade & received compensation from Plusnet.
Cityfibre managed to connect me to there network in one visit in under 2 hours & I’m now a happy Zen FTTP customer.