Telecoms and Broadband Disputes
Overview
Mobile, broadband, and landline disputes are regulated by Ofcom and resolved through dedicated ADR schemes. Whether your provider has failed to deliver the speed promised, overcharged you, or made it difficult to leave, you have clear rights under UK consumer law and Ofcom's General Conditions of Entitlement.
Key Legislation and Regulation
- GC C1 (contract information and clear pre-sale disclosures)
- GC C2 (complaints handling and ADR access)
- GC C3 (switching and porting, including One Touch Switch for broadband and the PAC/STAC system for mobile)
- GC C5 (fair and appropriate treatment of vulnerable customers)
Common Issues
Broadband speed
Under Ofcom's voluntary code, if your provider cannot deliver the minimum speed guaranteed at point of sale, you have the right to exit the contract penalty-free. The provider must attempt to fix the issue first, but if they cannot, you can leave.
Mid-contract price increases
From 17th January 2025 Ofcom banned inflation-linked or percentage-based price-rise terms in all new telecoms contracts. Any price rise written into a new contract from that date must be set out in pounds and pence at the point of sale. The rules do not apply retrospectively to contracts agreed before 17th January 2025, which can still include CPI-plus formulas.
Switching and leaving
The One Touch Switch process for broadband means your new provider handles everything. You should not face double billing or service gaps. Early termination charges must be reasonable and proportionate.
Service outages
Under Ofcom's Automatic Compensation Scheme, providers signed up to the scheme pay specified rates without the consumer needing to claim. From 1st April 2026 the rates are £10.34 per day for delayed repairs after a total loss of service (starting from two full working days after you reported the fault), £32.31 per missed or late-cancelled engineer appointment, and £6.46 per day for delayed start of a new service. Auto-compensation does not bar a separate ombudsman complaint about other matters such as vulnerability, bundle termination, or poor complaint handling.
Vulnerability
Ofcom GC C5 requires every communications provider to establish and follow clear policies for the fair and appropriate treatment of vulnerable consumers. Vulnerability is broadly defined: health conditions, life events (hospital discharge, bereavement), low resilience, capability factors. Where the household includes a vulnerable person and the provider has been notified, the provider must record the vulnerability, apply Priority Fault Repair where they operate such a register, and offer proactive support during extended outages.
Step-by-Step
Step 1: Complain to the provider
Put your complaint in writing with the subject line containing the word "Complaint". Reference the specific Ofcom General Condition breached and what remedy you expect.
Step 2: Allow the internal handling window
The internal handling window under GC C2 was eight weeks until early 2026. From 8th April 2026 Ofcom rules reduce the wait to six weeks for new complaints raised with a provider on or after that date. Complaints raised before 8th April 2026 retain the eight-week window. Diarise the window from the date of your written complaint.
Step 3: ADR scheme
Escalate to either CISAS (administered by CEDR) or the Communications Ombudsman (administered by Ombudsman Services), depending on your provider's membership. The provider's bills, terms or complaints page will tell you which. The scheme is free, binding on the provider if you accept the decision, and can award up to £10,000 plus reasonable expenses.
Step 4: Ofcom
For systemic issues, report to Ofcom. They do not resolve individual complaints but use complaint data to take enforcement action. Ofcom's December 2025 fine of £23.8 million against a major UK telecoms provider for failures under GC C5.2 (vulnerable customers) is the recent benchmark.
What this looks like in practice: a case from the EvenStance founder
I am currently running a complaint at the Communications Ombudsman against a major UK telecoms provider. The complaint concerns a six-day total loss of broadband at the start of 2026, in a household that included a recently-discharged hospital patient. The vulnerability was notified to the provider on day three of the outage in writing. The provider did not place the household on its Priority Fault Repair register. It did not offer interim connectivity. It did not undertake any welfare check during the six days of outage. The auto-compensation calculation, which arrived as a silent credit on the next bill, was for the loss of service itself only; it addressed neither the GC C5 vulnerability failure nor the consequential damage to the rest of the bundle.
The bundle point is worth flagging. The broadband, landline and mobile were sold as a single package. A £20 per month discount was applied to each of two mobile lines as a "bundle discount", conditional on the broadband contract. When the broadband element failed and I exited under SI 2020/1419 (the right to terminate a bundle as a whole where any element fails to be supplied), the provider's cease confirmation removed both mobile discounts. The result was a £40 per month ongoing increase to the remaining mobile bills, on contracts I could not exit because they were not the failed element.
The complaint to the provider was rejected. The complaint to the Communications Ombudsman was rejected at first instance, on grounds that did not engage with the regulation I had cited.
The adjudicator's first-instance decision did three things wrong. It classified the six-day total loss as an "intermittent fault", which was inconsistent with the provider's own case file and with all parties' description of the outage as a complete loss. It treated 999 availability as an absolute, citing Ofcom guidance on emergency-call roaming without addressing my evidence that the property had no usable indoor signal across any of the four major networks and that Wi-Fi calling (the operative voice route in the household) had failed with the broadband. And, most importantly, it did not mention GC C5 anywhere in the decision text. C5 was the central regulatory ground in my evidence submissions. It received no analysis at all, neither to apply it nor to explain why it did not apply.
The evidence-comments stage is the procedural window in the Communications Ombudsman process where both parties can respond to the other's evidence before the adjudicator's draft determination. At the evidence-comments stage I asked the adjudicator to engage with GC C5 specifically. The response treated vulnerability as a matter of sympathy ("I can only imagine how frightening it must have felt") rather than a matter of regulatory compliance. That is the distinction the FCA's analogous Consumer Duty was written to close.
I filed a review request on 30th April 2026 on five specific grounds, presented as a numbered list rather than a re-argument: factual error on the intermittent-fault classification, factual error on the 999 absolute, material omission of GC C5, material omission of SI 2020/1419, and material omission of the £40 per month ongoing financial harm. The review is open as of May 2026.
What that tells you
Two principles generalise.
First, telecoms ADR is heavily regulation-driven and weakly narrative-driven. The adjudicator who has the General Condition cited in numbered paragraphs, with the specific provider conduct mapped to each one, will engage with it. The adjudicator who has only a story will treat the matter as a service grievance, apply auto-compensation, and decline. The work is in the citation, not in the description of how it felt to lose broadband for six days.
Second, the schemes have review mechanisms but the grounds are narrow. Factual error, material omission of regulation, and procedural unfairness will be considered. Simply disagreeing with the outcome will not. If a decision does not engage with regulation you specifically cited, that is grounds for review; write the review as a list of grounds, not as a restatement of the case.
For households with vulnerability factors, the General Conditions are a substantive consumer protection that providers have learned to apply in their policy documents and routinely fail to apply in practice. Notifying vulnerability in writing is the procedural anchor; cite GC C5 by number; ask in writing for the provider's vulnerability register status and for confirmation of the proactive support steps actually taken. The lack of those steps, evidenced by the absence of any record on the provider's own file, is what makes the C5 argument carry weight.
EvenStance Can Help
EvenStance checks your broadband speed rights, generates your formal complaint citing the right General Conditions, identifies the correct ADR scheme (CISAS or the Communications Ombudsman) for your provider, and prepares the submission with the regulatory grounds front-loaded. The platform tracks the new six-week (post-8th April 2026) and legacy eight-week internal handling clocks. For households with vulnerability factors, the GC C5 framework and the SI 2020/1419 bundle-termination analysis are built into the standard letter templates.
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