London Full Fibre Provider Community Fibre See Benefits of New ISP Switching System
Broadband ISP CommunityFibre (CF), which has rolled out their 3Gbps speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across around 1.4 million UK premises (predominantly in London), has today claimed to already be “reaping the rewards” from Ofcom’s new One Touch Switching (OTS) system for consumers migrating between providers.
Just to recap. Last week saw the long-awaited introduction of OTS, which has faced many delays but aims to make it both quicker and easier for consumers to switch between broadband providers on physically separate networks. However, despite a somewhat turbulent history and start, CommunityFibre sees only positives and has already completed its first customer installation in less than two days (who switched from Sky Broadband).
“By eliminating the need for customers to liaise with their existing providers, and only terminating contracts once their new provider is live, what was once a complicated, time-consuming process that can leave households without internet access will now become a seamless, risk-free experience for broadband users,” said CF, which believes that this will “continue to be a net positive for the company” when it comes to acquiring new customers.
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Graeme Oxby, CEO of CommunityFibre, said:
“I hope that the latest One Touch Switching rule change will continue to benefit both alternative broadband providers and consumers, now that it is easier for users of other networks to come and join us to experience the great services that Community Fibre provides.”
Residential customers of CF typically pay from £21 per month on a 24-month term for speeds of 150Mbps (symmetric) with free setup and an included WiFi 6 router, which rises to £56 for their top 3Gbps tier. The pricing is currently fixed if you join before 4th November 2024. At the end of your contract, your price will increase by £4 per month.
CommunityFibre also offers a separate 35Mbps social broadband tariff at £12.50 a month (rising to £16.50 after the first 12-months), although their 35Mbps plan isn’t technically a true Social Tariff because it’s available to everybody covered by their network (i.e. not just those on state benefits) and we rather like that.
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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I think they are premature on declaring benefits for them. The customer in question likely would have chosen to sign up anyway. The customer sees a benefit but there is no benefit to CF unless a customer chooses to come to them because of OTS…
The benefit is that the current vendor does not get the chance to offer a repriced service. With the locations they cover, they have Virgin as a major competitor and they are well known for offering major discounts to retain a customer while making the whole process of cancelling their service a real pain.
My contract was due to be finished Feb 2024 with VM. They were desperate to retain me as a very old customer – but they were offering 1 Gig non symmetric for £63 per month. I told them that i could get 1 gig symmetric for £25. VM admitted they could not match this.
Then they told me to ring a week before termination, this was a trick as according to them it takes two weeks to terminate. I rang before the two week period. Got CF fitted and apart for a 4 hour period where they said that engineers were in my area, so far so good.