Openreach Offer Cancellation Amnesty for Old UK Ethernet Orders
Network access provider Openreach (BT) is to introduce an interesting new special offer for UK ISPs, which proposes to waive the cancellation charges for their high-capacity Ethernet Access Direct (EAD) and Dark Fibre (DFA/X) products, albeit only where related orders are now “over 100 days old” (excluding delays caused by customers themselves).
The connection charge for EAD products can typically be quite hefty, often costing several thousand pounds, although this can vary a lot depending upon the specific product chosen and the impact of certain special offers. This is relevant because those who need to cancel an EAD order often need to pay back a significant percentage of this charge.
However, situations can sometimes arise where EAD and DFA/X orders may take a lot longer to provision than normally expected, such as due to issues with engineering surveys, the need for unforeseen groundworks, the absence of key infrastructure or a requirement for third-party permissions that is not forthcoming in a timely fashion etc.
Advertisement
Interestingly, Openreach has now announced that they will launch an “aged order cancellation amnesty” for those that are now over 100 days old, such as where customers optionally decide they don’t want to wait any longer (i.e. the order is “unwanted“). This will run between 18th December 2025 and 30th January 2026, although “any ECC charges already incurred will still apply, ensuring fairness and preventing misuse“.
Openreach will waive the cancellation charges (“Waived Cancellation Charges”) for any inflight Order for EAD, DFA, or DFX Service provision that are at least 100 Working Days old from the date on which the Order was Processed, excluding any customer delays (“Eligible Orders”) that are cancelled by the Communications Provider between 18 December 2025 and 30 January 2026 (“Special Offer period”).
Waived Cancellation Charges will:
b) be provided by way of a rebate made by Openreach in the next billing cycle following the cancellation of the Eligible Order;
c) not include any Excess Construction Charges (ECCs) associated with the Eligible Order that have already been incurred and which, for the avoidance of doubt, shall remain payable by the Communications Provider.
It’s worth remembering that late installs could also fall into conflict with some Service Level Agreements (SLA), which might attract demands for compensation.
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.
« GSMA Report Warns Mobile Operators Need 3x More Spectrum for 6G
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.
Of course, not wanting to pay large SLA amounts for late delivery of a service has nothing to do with this…
I kept screenshots of my Plusnet FTTP upgrade install progress as communication between Plusnet & Openreach is recorded in your account question portal.
Came in handy when Openreach lied to Plusnet & myself which ended up with me getting annoyed at Openreach incompetence & cancelling the FTTP upgrade free of charge.
cease fee is rip off by openreach. should be free of charge for any cease order.
Pretty much given up on BT now. They can’t deliver FTTP here till mid 2026 if we were lucky. Brsk had installed and running in days, albeit with some teething problems, but once resolved the last business lines were ceased as soon as the numbers were ported out.
Sadly still paying to keep email addresses.
You can still access the email address, only via weblink and not the app.
Get an email client manager tool (many are free)
I know someone who sued for the email retention and got £3.2k back as it was 20+ years they’d been paying
The remarks about consumer FTTP above have no relevance to an offer on Ethernet (leased line) services, which are a completely different type of connection product for network operators and businesses.
Delayed leased lines are likely to be those with unexpected engineering difficulties (= expensive to provision). Not surprising that Openreach is happy if the customer wants to pull out!
Interesting, we’ve got 3 leased lines that need a B end move & the 3 different carriers are all having a huge amount of trouble getting any response out of Openreach (all 3 tails are provided by Openreach as it is the only option), this looks like there is a problem with engineering availability & someone is trying to manage down the backlog.
We are with Vodafone and wanted to upgrade from fttc to fttp, but the checker stated we could not. This was despite the fact that the network had been upgraded 12 months ago. So I checked and it resulted in openreach admitting their records were wrong, however it has taken 3 months and one cancelled order along with compensation from Vodafone for delayed install. They are coming tomorrow to provide the fibre kit on the pole serving our house and 3 others, suspect this was the reason they didn’t do it 12 months ago, ie too much work for only 3 possible customer upgrades to overhead fibre.