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A new letter from Ofcom, targeted at BT, Sky, TalkTalk, and Virgin Media O2 (VMO2), is pushing the operators to increase their efforts to make One Touch Switching (OTS) a reality
This week, Ofcom’s Director of Telecoms Consumer Protection Networks & Communications, Cristina Luna-Esteban, has sent a stern letter to UK ISPs, urging them to accelerate their implementation of OTS.
More specifically, the letter expresses continued dissatisfaction with BT, Sky, TalkTalk, and VMO2’s efforts to implement OTS, calling on them “with utmost urgency to finalise a launch date that is the earliest possible”.
“Ofcom is very concerned about the repeated delays and the length of time now being taken to finalise an agreed go-live date, which is preventing consumers from realising the benefits of easier and simpler switching,” read the letter from Luna-Esteban.
“Lindsey Fussell, Ofcom’s Group Director of Networks & Communications, has written to each of the four providers to set out our concerns, and to require them with utmost urgency to finalise a launch date that is the earliest possible implementation date for OTS. We are cognisant that the lack of clarity about the go live date is also creating uncertainty for industry.”
The concept of OTS – allowing customers to change ISP within a single day simply by contacting their new provider – has been a focus of Ofcom since 2021. Enabling OTS at a technical level is quite complex, hence Ofcom initially set a deadline of April 2023 to achieve this.
By the summer of 2022, ISPs had jointly established The One Touch Switching Company (TOTSCo) to facilitate collaboration towards this shared goal.
However, it quickly became apparent that the scale of the technical challenge was greater than feared. The April 2023 deadline was missed, with TOTSCo suggesting they needed another year (targeting March 2024) to complete the process. At the time, Ofcom stated their disappointment but took no further action.
Unfortunately, as the end of 2023 neared, TOTSCo released a statement arguing that they could no longer meet the revised deadline, though they did not go so far as to set a new one. This is the reason’s for today’s letter from Ofcom.
“Since TOTSCo’s announcement, there is still no clarity from industry on the OTS go live date, despite OTS being a regulatory requirement since April 2023. Ofcom is very concerned about the repeated delays and the length of time now being taken to finalise an agreed go-live date, which is preventing consumers from realising the benefits of easier and simpler switching,” said the letter.
While this situation is clearly frustrating Ofcom, there is still little sign that the regulator is looking to take a more leading role in proceedings. While the letter hints at “possible enforcement action”, which would presumably take the form of fines, Ofcom appears content to let the ISPs continue working to their own ambiguous schedule.
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