UK broadband is failing

Getting married and moving home are said to be among the most stressful things people experience. There are plenty more, but a particularly frustrating experience not on that list is attempting to switch broadband provider.

If telecoms regulator Ofcom is to be believed, this should be a pain-free exercise. But if that were the case, we wouldn’t be repeatedly hearing stories of elderly and vulnerable people seeing their broadband bills rise year after year. They continue to pay for a service that is inferior and more costly than other offerings from their existing broadband provider. It is too complicated for the non-tech-savvy among us to navigate the endless options available, even when using a comparison site.

The switch should be automatic – plug it in and you’re all set. Not so! If a new router is sent out, it will have a new Wi-Fi name and password. That means every device connected to Wi-Fi will need updating, and that can be a tricky task. Some of that equipment may be quite old, and people tend to connect devices such as TVs, smart speakers and doorbells to the Wi-Fi once and then forget about it. Who keeps the instruction manual? And even if it has been put somewhere safe, can you remember where that safe place is?

Failing in fibre to the home

One customer had a rather worrying experience just a few days ago. We have all seen Openreach, or its contractors, busy laying optical fibre in the neighbourhood, so one would hope they are well on the way to connecting UK residences to ultrafast fibre broadband. But the system is utterly broken. Imagine having checked your postcode and being sold a new ultrafast fibre broadband contract, only to find, when the engineer visits, that your home does not, in fact, have any fibre connectivity at all. Well, in this case it did – but it was fibre originally installed by Virgin Media, which has nothing to do with Openreach. The result was that the customer had cancelled appointments to wait in for the engineer’s visit, and the engineer had wasted an hour or so at the customer’s address, plus travel time, only to find the installation wasn’t possible.

One would expect – if switching broadband providers was as easy as Ofcom claims – that it would be possible to swap providers and not have to be concerned whether the optical fibre connecting your home to a comms cabinet in the street is compatible with the broadband service operated by the new provider. We don’t, in this country, have a separate water, gas or electricity supply for each and every provider connecting our homes. There is, in effect, one pipe and the utility providers compete for residential customers on billing, customer service and internally on business efficiency. Sadly, the UK’s broadband sector is utterly broken.