According to some, getting married and moving home are two of the most difficult experiences people have. There are many more, but trying to switch broadband provider is a particularly annoying experience certainly on that list.
If telecoms regulator Ofcom is to be believed, this should be a pain-free exercise. However, if that were the case, we would n’t be hearing tales of elderly and flimsy people seeing their broadband bills increase year after year. They continue to pay for a service from their current broadband provider that is less expensive and superior to other options. Also when using a comparison website, it is very difficult for the less-tech-savvy among us to navigate the endless options available.
Plug in the switch and you’re all set; it should be programmed. No so! If a novel router is sent out, it will have a fresh Wi-Fi name and password. That implies that every Wi-Fi device will need to be updated, which can be challenging. Some of that equipment may be very old, and people frequently connect devices like TVs, bright speakers, and doorbells to Wi-Fi only once and forget about it later. Who keeps the instruction manual? Can you recall the location of the safe place, even if it has been placed anywhere else?
Having a problem with fiber in the home
Only a few days ago, a customer had a more unsettling experience. We have all seen Openreach, or its contractors, busy laying visual fibre in the neighbourhood, so one would hope they are also on the way to connecting UK residences to fast fabric broadband. But the system is absolutely broken. Imagine being offered a new fast fiber broadband contract after checking your postcode and being informed that your home does not actually have any fibre connectivity when the engineer comes in. Well, in this case it did – but it was optic previously 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 was n’t possible.
If switching broadband providers was as simple as Ofcom claims, one would think it would be possible to switch providers without having to worry about whether the visual fiber that connects your home to a streetcomms cabinet is compatible with the new provider’s broadband service. We do n’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 domestically on business efficiency. Unfortunately, the UK’s broadband sector is utterly broken.
