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The Common Wholesale Platform (CWP), which is a non-profit member-owned organisation that helps alternative broadband networks to connect with the retail ISP market, has said that it plans to preview its new Business Switching solution for ISPs and UK businesses at next week’s Connected Britain 2025 event.
The goal of the new system is to give businesses a “faster, simpler, and more reliable way” to change telecom providers while ensuring compliance with Ofcom rules. The regulator technically only requires residential providers to adopt their One Touch Switching (OTS) solution, and business connections have tended to be treated differently. But business providers are still required to follow many of the core OTS rules.
A number of groups, including the One Touch Switching Company (TOTSCo) and others, have thus been developing their own competitive switching solutions for business providers and CWP is one of those. The solution they’ve developed also builds on the new Connected Services Framework (CSF) – the open industry standard for business switching and collaborative processes, developed by the Technical Architecture Group (TAG).
Unlike consumer switching, where the OTS Hub became the mandated centralised model, the CSF “avoids the limitations of a single hub, offering a distributed, extensible, and cost-efficient framework for the UK telecom market“. The CWP says CSF has been designed to overcome challenges seen with OTS and to empower providers with greater flexibility.
Key Innovations Include:
1. A secure, distributed directory of ISPs, maintained without reliance on a central hub.
2. Lower costs for providers, removing barriers faced by smaller ISPs. Something that is a challenge for consumer switching using OTS.
3. Enhanced messaging between providers, including CP-CP communications and outage notifications.
4. An extensible framework, paving the way for future services like improved number porting and wholesale capabilities.
However, it’s too early to judge what ISPs will make of this, and we’re expecting there to be several different switching solutions for business connectivity providers to consider. Unlike the service that underpins consumer switching, business switching is a competitive market.