TOTSCo Celebrate 200,000 Completed UK Broadband and Phone Switches
The industry-led One Touch Switching Company (TOTSCo), which operates the central messaging platform that helps UK ISPs to implement Ofcom’s new One Touch Switching (OTS) process, has today announced that they’ve completed 200,000 switches of broadband and phone services since going live on 12th Sept 2024 (up by 20,000 this week).
In case anybody has forgotten, OTS aims to make it both quicker and easier for consumers to switch between broadband and phone providers, even when those ISPs are on physically separate UK networks. However, TOTSCo’s messaging platform, as well as the processes and systems that ISPs themselves need to develop in order to interface with it, are still a bit of a work-in-progress. But it’s clearly continuing to improve (see the latest switching data).
As well as celebrating the achievement of 200,000 successfully completed switches this week (here), TOTSCo also noted that take-up by laggard ISPs has continued to grow, with 287 brands now in their live directory (up by +7 over the past week). The previous week’s update noted that there were still 40 communication providers completing the testing process before going live, which suggests that this figure is probably now getting closer to 30.
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One of the advantages of TOTSCo is that it’s giving us a unique insight into the real-world level of active consumer switching between UK broadband and phone providers. Suffice to say, it will be interesting to see how the looming Christmas and New Year period impacts the volume of switches, as there are sure to be some interesting trends (some ISPs often pause or reduce their support over the festive period).
At present we can already see that the number of switch orders is climbing, which is likely to reflect a combination of the Black Friday season (lots of discounts), as well as the rising adoption of TOTSCo’s platform by ISPs. But there’s still a fair bit of work left for ISPs and TOTSCo to do in order to further improve the new process, although it’s going in the right direction.
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 to call TOTSCo any sort of success is a stretch.
Fundamentally it is no more than a data matching platform, no real benefit to the order process beyond informing the end user that their new provider has raised a request against their old provider, which if course is just a positive feedback loop based on the data that the end user has provided themselves.
No improvement to order process beyond that as far as I can tell.
Hasnt worked for me, it would appear that this woderful systems is really only for consumer/residential switches, If you havea ‘business’ account then it doesnt work, you have to get your new providers migration teams to ‘do it the old way’ and try and a get a consumer/residential supplier to do this draws blansk and a no systems says you can’t keep your old landline number. And our course Ofcon leap from behind their consumer firewall to ‘regulate’ and action this, like a chocholate fireguard.
Anyone might have considered ‘residential’ ‘business’ swaps would’t they.. or maybe they were using AI (awful i)?
Well not Ofcon or TOTSCo, quality /dilligence lost to spin and bs.
Heres an Idea, a national infrastructure, not 280 ‘providers; CxOs, ‘switching migration’ teams (or a bunch of ‘investmenr’ shareholding parasites adding ££££££s to the consumer costs, all this could be [££]£££££££s saved, then a straightforward national set of tarrifs with no geographic discrimination!
No thank you. No incentive for any innovation at all with a single provider. Inevitably ends up providing lowest common denominator as no-one has any choice besides using cellular.
Some ISP’s wanted both residential and business switching to be included but the complexity of doing business as well would have meant timelines that Ofcom just wouldn’t have agreed to.
In the old days Ofcom would have been put firmly back in its box but ISP’s these days largely (with one or two exceptions) run scared of the regulator.
Those left high and dry when switching goes to pot will be the very same people this was intended to protect, ironically.
Of course Ofcom will blame the ISP’s and say they had plenty of time.