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The One Touch Switching Company (TOTSCo), which is the industry-led organisation responsible for helping to deliver Ofcom’s solution (One Touch Switching) for easier and quicker UK consumer switching between broadband and phone providers on different networks, has successfully completed 1 million service migrations since its launch on 12th September 2024.
The OTS system 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 despite a bit of a bumpy start, which we won’t recap today, this has now been widely adopted by the vast majority of consumer facing ISPs.
On the flip side, some smaller ISPs continue to lag behind on their adoption, which is causing problems for consumers who wish to escape or even join those same providers (Ofcom has yet to take any solid action against this). In addition, TOTSCo’s messaging platform, including the systems that some ISPs have put in place for engaging with it, remains somewhat of an imperfect animal where bugs and problems can still obstruct or delay switches.
“The OTS process is now well established, and we’re seeing the positive results of our combined efforts,” said Paul Bradbury, CEO of TOTSCo. “As providers and [Managed Access Providers (MAPs)] have become more familiar with OTS, we’ve noticed a significant reduction in issues and enquiries while the overall match-rate has risen gradually since go-live from 60% to a current value of around 67%. This demonstrates the effectiveness of the process and the collective commitment across industry to continuous improvement.”
Despite the issues, it’s pleasing to see the 1 million switches milestone being achieved (up from 920,000 on 25th April – just two weeks ago, or about 40k per week) and this also provides a solid figure for the level of actual consumer switching that is taking place between broadband ISPs in the UK market. The figure is many times lower than the artificially inflated claims about switching that we often see from those flaky opinion-based consumer surveys.
The TOTSCo platform is now switching (no pun intended) its focus toward the development of a switching solution for business connections and providers (details), which is occurring alongside the separate Gaining Provider Led Business (GPLB) Switching Industry Process (here). The first connection testing for this is still due to get underway at the end of this month, with the goal then being to then go live with a viable service in “early 2026“.
The difficulty is that business connectivity is a much more challenging, diverse and complex field, where the sort of problems that ISPs have encountered with consumer switching is less likely to be well tolerated. But to be clear, while business providers are still required to follow most of the same OTS rules (i.e. Ofcom simply have not specified what the process should be for such ISPs), there is no requirement for any ISP to use TOTSCo’s own business switching solution (once it exists) and business switching is considered a competitive market. In practice, many will probably still end up using TOTSCo’s platform.