The industry-led One Touch Switching Company (TOTSCo), which operates the central messaging platform that helps UK ISPs to implement Ofcom’s new One Touch Switching (OTS) process, has today announced that they’ve completed 200,000 switches of broadband and phone services since going live on 12th Sept 2024 (up by 20,000 this week).
In case anybody has forgotten, OTS aims to make it both quicker and easier for consumers to switch between broadband and phone providers, even when those ISPs are on physically separate UK networks. However, TOTSCo’s messaging platform, as well as the processes and systems that ISPs themselves need to develop in order to interface with it, are still a bit of a work-in-progress. But it’s clearly continuing to improve (see the latest switching data).
As well as celebrating the achievement of 200,000 successfully completed switches this week (here), TOTSCo also noted that take-up by laggard ISPs has continued to grow, with 287 brands now in their live directory (up by +7 over the past week). The previous week’s update noted that there were still 40 communication providers completing the testing process before going live, which suggests that this figure is probably now getting closer to 30.
One of the advantages of TOTSCo is that it’s giving us a unique insight into the real-world level of active consumer switching between UK broadband and phone providers. Suffice to say, it will be interesting to see how the looming Christmas and New Year period impacts the volume of switches, as there are sure to be some interesting trends (some ISPs often pause or reduce their support over the festive period).
At present we can already see that the number of switch orders is climbing, which is likely to reflect a combination of the Black Friday season (lots of discounts), as well as the rising adoption of TOTSCo’s platform by ISPs. But there’s still a fair bit of work left for ISPs and TOTSCo to do in order to further improve the new process, although it’s going in the right direction.