Ofcom, the United Kingdom’s regulatory authority for telecommunications, has released data from its quarterly report covering the period from January to March 2023. The report displays a slight increase in customer complaints concerning telecom and Pay-TV services.
The documents released by the agency focus on the broader UK telecoms market, capturing consumer opinions about telecom operators, services, market trends, subscriber data and revenue information.
The data encompasses landline, fixed broadband, pay-monthly mobile and Pay-TV services across the UK. It includes data on individual providers by service category as well as the main sources of complaints. These include areas such as how complaints were addressed, challenges associated with changing providers, billing issues, pricing, charges, faults and problems with service and provisioning.
One of the key takeaways from Ofcom’s report is an increase in the relative volume of complaints across all service categories, with the fixed broadband services seeing the most, reaching 12 complaints per 100,000 subscribers. This figure marks a 20% rise when compared with the same quarter in the previous year.
TalkTalk was cited as the most complained-about provider in both the landline and fixed broadband sectors due to service faults and provisioning, as well as how customer complaints were managed.
On the other hand, BT Mobile emerged as the most complained-about provider in the pay-monthly mobile sector, largely due to issues customers experienced when trying to change providers and how complaints were handled. However, it is important to note that BT Mobile’s remit does not encompass EE services, which BT also owns.
Moving on to the Pay-TV sector, BT once again was identified as the top operator for customer complaints, while Sky received the least amount of complaints. In fact, Sky had the lowest complaint totals in all four service categories. Within the pay-monthly mobile sector, it claimed this position jointly with EE and Tesco Mobile.
Fergal Farragher, Ofcom’s Consumer Protection Director, noted, “The slight increase in complaints across all services shows providers still have work to do when it comes to the quality of service they offer their customers.” Farragher also mentioned an improvement in Shell Energy’s performance when compared to previous reports.
Data from earlier reports showed Shell Energy recording a drop in complaints, from 25 per 100,000 subscribers to 10 in the first quarter of 2023. While this still places them closely behind TalkTalk, it points to a significant improvement.
Ofcom has been providing quarterly data on residential complaints since 2011, and aims to enable consumers to assess quality and value for money effectively when making provider choices. Additionally, the regulator stressed that the transparency from publishing this data can serve as an incitement for service providers to improve their performance, demonstrated by Shell Energy’s recent progress.
In other developments, Ofcom also made public data on the UK telecoms market, covering fixed and mobile revenues, and subscriber trends.
The report announced an increase of 261,000 broadband lines, which constitutes a year-on-year increase of 0.9%. Tailored revenues for the fixed broadband sector were not reported, but the UK market observed an 8.2% decrease, which equates to £118 million in fixed voice service revenues. Almost half of the total voice revenues belong to BT.
The number of fixed exchange lines has been on a downward trend in the UK and across many global markets, in favour of mobile telephony. Concurrently, standalone fixed broadband services have enjoyed a rise, as technologies such as fibre and cable broadband shift dependency away from fixed exchange lines for broadband access.
Mobile revenues saw an uptick, with a 3.7% growth from the previous year, generating approximately £3.2bn in retail revenues in Q1 2023. The number of active mobile subscribers saw a 1.9% increase compared to last year. Given the current inflation rates in the UK, these market trends come as no surprise.
