First Residential UK Broadband Customers Change ISP via New Switching System
The industry-led One Touch Switching Company (TOTSCo), which holds responsibility for implementing Ofcom’s heavily delayed One Touch Switch (OTS) migration system for faster consumer switching between UK internet service providers, has reported its “first successful residential customer switches” during the final trial phase.
The OTS system was originally due to go live in April 2023, but it’s since suffered big delays (details here, here and here) and is now planned to launch on 12th September 2024 (here). Ofcom has placed most of the blame for this at the feet of the major broadband ISPs, with the regulator singling out BT, Sky Broadband, TalkTalk and Virgin Media (VMO2) for being slow to complete the necessary testing and trials (here). But that’s another story.
The good news this week is that TOTSCo’s trials of their OTS system have at least managed to achieve an important milestone with the placement of the first residential consumer switch orders, which is despite the company suffering some recent criticism due to issues with remaining bugs, feature freezes and questionable standardisation etc. (here).
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Paul Bradbury, CEO of TOTSCo, said:
“This week marks a significant milestone as we enter the ramp stage of industry trials with the placement of the first residential consumer switch orders. During the ramp stage, participants [ISPs] will place an increasing share of switch orders through OTS, until OTS go-live on 12 September.
With only seven weeks remaining until the OTS go-live, this achievement is both a crucial milestone and a very encouraging sign of our progress. I would like to thank everyone for their hard work and dedication in getting us to this stage. Your continued efforts are crucial as we move forward, and I appreciate all the work still to come.”
The reality is that the OTS system TOTSCo implements is likely to suffer from a few teething problems at launch, so if any savvy consumers are waiting on its launch before committing to a change of ISP then it might be wise to wait a little longer (past the launch date) in order to allow a bit more time for any nasty launch day bugs to be squashed.
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.
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But was a that a change of ISP on the same network?
I agree, or was it managers in one company changing to the ISP they work for, and will most likely get the service for free?
Yes, this is all about changing ISPs on the same Network.
@Pobox112
OTS is most certainly supposed to be about changing providers across networks (e.g. Openreach to altnet, VM to Openreach etc etc).
prboably BT>EE -.-
I am a trialist going from Virgin to an Openreach ISP. I’m still waiting for it to go live (Tuesday, assuming OR don’t freak out at my flat roof and require a different engineer), but so far the comms have been spot on in terms of early termination charges and dates.
Adrian Kennard (the brains behind Andrew’s and Arnold) has been rather vociferous about the challenge that it is implementing OTS.
Apparently the specs are poorly written, ambiguous and sometimes downright silly.
He’s got a very good blog at https://www.revk.uk/ where he vents his frustrations 🙂
Another manifestation of the neo-liberal business model.? … set-up an operation on a flood of dot.com bubble hubris, with the barest of specification, no R&D, no quality control, under-skilled labour, huge, umnanageable span of control for individual managers:and a tortuous or non-existent customer service regime,… sell the concept to the clueless/cynical up-tops (Managers or regulators) and start operations prematurely and let customers find the faults for you.
I was forgetting, … ensure there is absolutely no free-flow of co-operatively produced ideas for improvement between service providers due to the prevalent dog-eat-dog business culture.
What could possibly go wrong ?