TOTSCo Publish Outcome of Consultation on Improving UK Broadband Switching
The not-for-profit and industry-funded One Touch Switching Company (TOTSCo), which is responsible for delivering Ofcom’s solution for easier and quicker switching between UK broadband and phone providers (One Touch Switching), has today published the outcome of their recent consultation on improving the system’s performance and monitoring.
The system, which went live on 12th September 2024, remains a Gaining Provider Led (GPL) process, where the customer contacts their new (“gaining“) ISP to start and manage the process on their behalf. But after a bit of a bumpy start and some ongoing issues, the new system is already helping around 1.8 million consumers to switch ISP every year and is also in the process of being extended to business connections (currently in trial).
However, TOTSCo recently outlined a list of “opportunities for improvement” to their system (detailed summary), which they said could sometimes “lead to a poor switching experience and/or consumer harm”. In response, the company launched a consultation on several proposed remedies, which attracted responses from various ISPs such as BT, Sky Broadband, Virgin Media, CommunityFibre, Vodafone (VodafoneThree), Truespeed and more (see ISP responses).
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The providers, which said TOTSCo should prioritise engagement with higher-volume but lower-performing providers and expressed a view that “performance issues are often driven by a small number of providers not adhering to the OTS process rather than industry-wide challenges“, were said to have been broadly supportive of TOTSCo’s proposed approach. They also called for “richer and more meaningful performance insights” of the system.
The responses have today encouraged TOTSCo to take forward the following Monitoring & Improvement activities.
| Monitoring & Improvement Activity | What TOTSCo will do |
| Improve and expand TOTSCo current performance and monitoring information | • Publish additional match rate information and, in parallel, work with industry to obtain session-based match rate data. • Engage with stakeholders to discuss underlying session match rate methodologies and determine whether, and in what form, this information can be published. |
| Support individual providers | • Facilitate bilateral engagement with providers, initially focusing on those with the highest volumes, to improve match success rates. • Share anonymised insights from these discussions with the wider industry where appropriate. • Introduce Service Review Meetings on a voluntary basis, beginning with larger providers, to address key aspects of the OTS process and share best practice. |
| Make more detailed provider-specific reports available | • Provide insights to help providers better understand their performance, with reports shared confidentially with providers. |
| Assess industry views on outage notification approach | • Develop a proposal for an outage notification threshold to reduce the volume of alerts relating to minor or quickly resolved incidents. • Discuss the proposed approach with industry, initially through the Operations Forum. |
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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They needed a consultation to work out that they broadly need to follow the data that’s causing the problem…? Establish the patterns where there are problems and talk to the relevant stakeholders.
Cuckoo have been an absolute nightmare when migrating out to another provider. Their OTS is broken as far as I can see
Can you elaborate a bit on your experience Ian?
TOTSCo want to “Share anonymised insights …”.
Isn’t it now time to Name & Shame those “… higher-volume but lower-performing providers …”?
Haven’t they had enough time already to get their corporate acts together?
Aquiss to Olilo are absolute nightmare when migrating out to another provider. Their OTS is broken as well. I have to say OTS are useless and waste of time.
For the big ISPs I agree
Maybe have some kind of badge that all ISPs need to display, like banks need to show their customer service metrics
If everyone could see at signup that their chosen ISP wasn’t performing well it might make them change their mind, which would motivate the ISP to fix the issue.
At the moment it seems like some ISPs don’t have much motivation, especially for outbound switches
They need to include all order into TOTSCo ONS process even if the user declares they not have a current ISP, TOTSCo should have that data to better understand what it going on and their impact on the broadband market.
They also need to expand the ONS process so that if a user tries to switch to another provider, their previous provide provides a warning about early cancellation of service in the response to TOTSCo. E.g. warn user they are still in contract before they try to switch. Too many user are unaware of the contract status and are ending up with early exit fees.
Perhaps for end of contract fees, also inform the gaining ISP. This would allow the gaining ISP to message the customer and say you have an early termination fee of £100 from old ISP, but we’re prepared to reimburse that fee automatically if you go ahead with the switch
Wow just think if it was a homogeneous national infrastuctre farther than a fragnet and of multiple ‘resellers’, hakers even, none it would be needed… it would all be down to the one supplier, and even maybe with a overwatching ‘complaints’ regulator, just imagine how efficient that could be..
Sounds absolutely dreadful. It would be an overpriced lowest common denominator CGNAT 100 MBit/s max service – because nobody needs Gbit/s or static IP, so we are told, so why should tax payers invest in it – no alternative, no escape. In theory the government could run an ultra efficient service and maybe knock a quid off the current cheapest options but there is no evidence of that capability in the UK. Look how terrible everything the government runs is actually despite the highest levels of tax on record. And in any case diversity of options trumps all of that not everybody wants the cheapest possible barely working cookie-cutter service. And that’s before we even get into the growing issue of state surveillance and censorship. If the government owns the network they won’t need to do any of the due process they need to do to get private providers to comply.