Summary of Today’s UK Telecoms Related April Fools News for 2026
It’s that time of year again, when at least some of the UK’s telecoms and broadband operators will be publishing industry news / press releases that are likely to be comically untrue for the sake of a good April Fools. We’ve not done one ourselves this year, but will be summarising a few of the others we’ve seen or been sent.
The first example comes from Welsh altnet Ogi (here), which playfully claims to have taken a break from rolling out full fibre broadband to launch a new Ogi Dial-up service for customers: “So, while the rest of the world races towards faster, smarter and more invisible technology, Ogi Dial-up helps people pause for a moment and enjoy the noise, the nostalgia and the unhurried pleasure of the early world wide web – after all, some things really are worth the wait” – well that’s one way of describing the horrible narrowband era 🙂 .
Meanwhile, over at business ISP Exa Networks, the company claim to have “officially upgraded our infrastructure to run on Tea … Early testing shows a direct correlation between brew strength and bandwidth” (here). Naturally they’re rolling this out across Yorkshire first.
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We’ll add more if or when they’re spotted.
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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Olilo published this:
Introducing: Pay-Per-Ping™ – The Future of Fair Internet
Alright… we’ve been cooking behind the scenes and it’s finally time.
To make things more efficient (and definitely not chaotic), we’re rolling out a brand new billing model across Olilo:
⚡ £0.0001 per ping
£0.01 per packet loss event
Idle connections? Still free… we’re not monsters
—
Gamers – you may want to sit down
Network nerds – your Grafana dashboards are now financial reports
That one device constantly pinging 8.8.8.8… we see you
—
We believe this will encourage mindful bandwidth usage and really bring the community together during your upcoming bankruptcy proceedings
Billing starts today at midnight. Good luck.
(…or does it? )
In other news:
The government is banning mid-contract price rises
Virgin Media are announcing a complete overhaul of their CS
Openreach is making symmetrical speeds standard within the next year
Sky is bringing back local DVRs for Stream subscribers
All three mobile network providers have decided to combine all their masts and plan to eliminate all poor signal areas creating 100% coverage.
Cityfibre has announced a deal allowing them to reach 100% coverage by 2030.
Did I miss anything?
I Just got a return bag for my Youfibre router – which is odd as it’s the only one I have
That made me chuckle. SO I recycled the returns bag
All the major ISP have agreed that if they say they will call you back within X hours and fall to do so they will a) pay you back for your wasted time b) personally buy you a pint (or your preferred drink) at your local c) fire the people involved (out of a canon).
Well that’s Youfibre out of business.
That said they think £99 for something that can bearly get to 4Gbps is a joke
Jack – agents only promise to call you back to protect their FCR (First Call Resolution) stat which their bonus is built on. If they see you’ve called back in before they’re due to call you (ruining their stats and damaging their bonus), then they won’t bother.
Maybe it isn’t them, maybe it’s you that’s the problem?
I had a call to say my speed problem was fixed. I initially hung up after saying ” yeah good one” and then they called back – it was real.
But what a day!
AMD says it will buy Intel, completing the strangest reversal in chip history | TechSpot https://share.google/SezbPsjub7yeC3S3v
Openreach issues a new “Digital Voice i-Plate” to retrofit in advance to existing NTE5mk4 copper master socket, automatically rerouting your Digital Voice/VoIP voice connection to your existing analogue extensions on your cutover date from analogue POTS (as long as you have wired your extensions correctly into the existing NTE5mk4, which of course always happens).
Works with both SOGEA/VDSL2/ADSL2+ and FTTP incoming lines, and supports later transition from Digital Voice over SOGEA/VDSL2/ADSL2+ to FTTP with no additional adjustments.
Well I can dream!
(Just had Sky schedule my long awaited free FTTC/VDSL2 incl. POTS landline transition to FTTP with router based VOIP and number transition, meaning I will have to rewire the analogue extensions in the house to connect to the router instead of the NTE5mk4, which is fortunately next to the router. If only Sky’s routers acted as DECT base stations it would be so much easier, just reconfigure my existing Panasonic DECT phones with digital answerphone to use ISP router as the master station)
Just had one from O2 stating
“From now on, we are no longer oversubscribed no matter the circumstances from now on and we will reverse that second promise rise in the last quarter last year”