Ofcom Raise UK Consumer Compensation Payments for Broadband ISP Woes
The UK telecoms and internet content regulator, Ofcom, has just increased the payment amounts that are issued to consumers under their automatic compensation system, which requires supporting home broadband ISPs to compensate customers (cash or bill credits) for serious internet connectivity outages and delivery delays.
The voluntary system, which first launched on 1st April 2019 (full summary here), was originally designed to compensate consumers by £8 per day for delayed repairs following a loss of broadband (assuming it isn’t fixed within 2 working days). Missed appointments could also attract compensation of £25 and a delay to the start of a new service would be £5 per day.
However, the compensation payment amounts are designed to increase annually in line with inflation from 1st April each year, which is based on the Consumer Price Index (CPI) as set on 31st October in the previous year. In other words, the amount that signatory ISPs must pay out to compensate consumers has been steadily rising each year.
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The latest increase means that providers will now need to pay out £10.34 per day for delayed repairs, £32.31 for missed appointments and £6.46 per day for a delay to the start of a new service. One catch here is that higher payments also contribute to general bill hikes and naturally discourages more ISPs from joining voluntarily – especially smaller providers – given the high cost and technical requirements of implementation. We should point that some of those self-excluded providers already have their own approaches to compensation, which may or may not be better than Ofcom’s.
In 2024 Ofcom’s automatic compensation scheme paid out a total of over £63m to customers when things went wrong with their broadband and/or landline (down from £67m in 2023), which reflects an overall total of approximately 1 million individual payments (down from 1.2 million in 2023).
The largest proportion of automatic compensation paid in both 2023 and 2024 was for delays to the start of new services (£41.6m in 2024 and £38.8m in 2023). The overall number of missed appointments and delayed provision incidents have reduced considerably year-on-year (both by 13.2%).
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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Interesting that this still goes up by inflation but annual price increases are now a ridiculous fixed amount
It’s s shame Brsk were never part of it – I would have got just over £150 for the 2.5 weeks of sheetshow I went through. This is good to see
Same, I had over three weeks of downtime with them due to a faulty installation and there was no meaningful customer service. I dumped them for Zen, who are part of this scheme so I know I have some comeback if something goes wrong.
Yea Fibrus needs to actually apply them to weekends as they currently don’t …. one of the reasons I went back to Openreach. Also actually getting them to send an engineer out your more likely to get 8GB symmetrical connections on the Shetland Isles. My internet went sideways many weekends and I was scuppered but the went don’t pay compensation on weekend policy…..
Maybe slightly off topic..
As the IT specialist of our friend group, we recently had to spend 90 minutes fighting with a router to get an old HP printer to connect to it, after he’d already spent about 3 hours on the phone to the ISP and HP, neither of whom were able to work out the multiple causes of the problem. I was amused when they asked “Why don’t [ISP] send someone out to do this?” My response was simply “Because you’re paying them the grand total of £23/month for your [FTTP] service – it would take them about 6 years of you being a customer just to recoup the cost of an IT engineer” (referring to paying ~£150 out of the likely net profit of ~£1-2/month, after paying for the ‘free’ install, ‘free’ router and now wifi extenders too, any delay compensation, the OTS subscriptions, the PIA fees in this case, and then actually the costs to provide the internet access itself!).
I honestly wonder sometimes whether people put any thought into the actual costs of delivery of the things they buy, or are they just happy to have something to moan about when the prices go up.
These numbers now seem high enough that ISPs aren’t going to voluntarily take part in them. You could conceivably have your margins for the entire contract term wiped out by a storm bringing a tree down through a fibre, it seems like too much of a risk to take on.
Nice to see the everything for nothing compensation culture still alive and kicking!
The biggest problem with this compensation scheme is that Openreach contribution to the scheme does not increase with inflation. This means 100% of the increase is on the ISP when the cause of faults and installation delays and missed appointments are caused by Openreach. This in turn drives price increases on the consumer. Whilst Ofcom refuses to act to balance this out it will reach levels where large ISP’s may choose to abandon the voluntary scheme or ultimately pass the cost on to the consumer, negating the idea of compensation altogether.
I hate the scheme as it ramps up every year with inflation even for those providers who do not have annual price increases, or mid contract increases.
Furthermore, some customers now expect even more compensation on top of the auto comp. They’re a pain to deal with