One Touch Switching Company Sees 100,000 Broadband ISP Switching Orders
The industry-led One Touch Switching Company (TOTSCo) has issued a progress update on its work to support Ofcom’s new One Touch Switching (OTS) system, which started to go live last month and aims to make it easier for consumers to change broadband ISP. A total of 100,000 switch orders have been placed since launch, albeit with only 32,000 successful completions.
Progress is clearly being made, with 265 brands (i.e. internet providers and related companies) now live on the messaging platform and the switch match success rate reaching 60% this week. But TOTSCo acknowledges that it still needs to improve the success rate of the “matching process” (i.e. ensuring that customer switches are correctly verified and migrated between ISPs) before the backup is removed on the 24th October 2024. Ofcom required ISPs to maintain the old migration process until that date, as a fallback for switching failures.
The regulator recently drafted in the Telecoms Adjudicator (OTA) to help “coordinate and facilitate industry efforts“, not least by helping to identify the sources of the remaining issues and get them resolved before the deadline (here).
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Paul Bradbury, TOTSCo’s CEO, said:
We’re now into the third week of One Touch Switch (OTS) operations, with over 70 brands placing a total of 100,000 switch orders, resulting in more than 32,000 successful completions. This upward trend is highly encouraging and signals strong progress towards achieving full adoption of OTS for all switches in the coming weeks.
With over 265 brands now live and a switch match success rate at 60%, our focus remains firmly on helping the industry achieve full OTS adoption. Meetings have already begun as part of the ‘matching improvement activities’ outlined in Ofcoms open letter to the OTA2, and we are actively supporting these efforts. We are also working closely with the OTA2 to publish key lessons learned from this exercise as soon as possible.
As I have mentioned previously, we are seeing a number of issues that can be easily resolved by following the best practice guides.
At least one of the remaining problem areas could potentially be linked to TOTSCo’s move to offload their telephone support and backend to India, which some ISPs have told us has resulted in various problems with the new call centre staff struggling to understand many of their requests or being unable to help.
Otherwise, readers can see how the matching process is gradually improving here, and the hope is that they’ll be achieving a success rate of 100% or thereabouts before the deadline.
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.
32% of the time it works every time. Seriously a ~68% failure rate is shocking
Considering rogue switches and what not, 100% would indicate those are succeeding instead of failing. Is there data for when they have had switch orders but they were not authorised by the account holder?
“rogue switches and what not” this is <1% on the current OR system, why would it be almost 70% for this one? Serious question.
Where did I say its 70% or anywhere near it?
How do we know it is an “upward trend” (and to what extent) if we don’t have the figures for before the launch to compare?
There was a story posted a couple of weeks ago.
I’ve not compared performance but I assume it comes from there https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2024/09/ofcom-tells-uk-telecoms-adjudicator-to-help-fix-ots-broadband-isp-switching.html
We are a small ISP, all of our match requests so far are for people we have never heard of. I am betting loads of the fails are people picking the wrong losing ISP.