MSE News: Make it easier to switch broadband and phones, Ofcom says

Former_MSE_Helen

"Broadband and landline providers need to make it easier for consumers to switch, the chief executive of Ofcom said today..."

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Make it easier to switch broadband and phones, Ofcom says




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kwikbreaks

I wasn't aware that it is especially difficult now. Since broadband arrived for me back in 2001 I must have had half dozen or more different ISPs. The phone on ADSL was always BT though through choice following a bad experience with an alternative to BT before the days of public internet access.

zerog

Talktalk connected my phone to some random person's house and refused to acknowledge the problem even after we finally convinced them to try calling our number!

The random person got pretty p1ssed off with all the new people calling him too!

Porcupine

Switching providers on the same BT line is straightforward. It's when you don't have a BT line it gets messy.

Porting numbers is a pain. If you port a BT number to Virgin and then move house, you might not be able to port it back again, even if you're on the same exchange. Some providers can take ex-BT numbers from BT, but not ex-BT numbers from Virgin. You can port to VOIP, but it's down to porting agreements between individual number holders. If your current telco doesn't have a porting agreement with the one you want to move the line to, you can't port. Want to port your SkypeIn number to your BT landline? Good luck with that. And porting is a manual paper-based process and costs about £20 per number (which is fun if you're a business with lots of numbers).

Meanwhile porting mobile numbers is easy and free. But for some reason landline phones are stuck in the 1980s. And let's not get started on the 056 numbers that you can't dial if you have a line from some telcos (hello Virgin) because they can't be bothered to connect the call.

kwikbreaks

zerog wrote: »

Talktalk connected my phone to some random person's house and refused to acknowledge the problem even after we finally convinced them to try calling our number!

The random person got pretty p1ssed off with all the new people calling him too!

That's just an engineer error (an Openreach engineer error) and has nothing to do with any system under consideration for easier transfers of lines or broadband. Whatever system is in place the physical connection still belongs to Openreach and will be subject to their poor service.

Now if Ofcom had decided to remove the Openreach monopoly and force them to sell off parts of the infrastructure to competitors that would be very welcome news. Anything else is just tinkering about around the edges.

I_luv_cats

If you go the whole hog (phone & BB) to LLU what are your options if you want to switch?

Has LLU to LLU switching been addressed?



(history: I had a kerfuffel getting Tiscali to take-over an inactive BT line and when TalkTalk purchased Tiscali I didn't fancy them, so had to go back to BT LR + o2 BB, because of LLU)

minislim

erm? not quite sure why ofcom are wasting time with this subject?

the majority of switching of broadband and telecoms providers is relatively easy!

i'd rather ofcom pooled their resources more on the mobile phone mid contract price hiking subject which they seem to have gone rather quiet on.

kwikbreaks

Well this news has obviously got MSE Helen excited as she's started two threads now on this subject. I reported the second as a duplicate and put a post in it saying so. That post has been deleted and the second thread still lives.