BT has temporarily cut off the broadband of some customers to get them to act on switching their landlines to digital. Here is the company’s explanation:
“A small minority of customers are yet to move and haven’t responded to repeated communications about the change. The temporary broadband pause we have introduced for this small minority is intended to help prevent a complete loss of service when the old, analogue network is retired.”
What concern for the customer! BT interrupts a service the customer already has, and invites us to understand the interruption as help in keeping a service. It possesses the connection, it can withdraw the connection, and it uses this power to obtain the customer’s cooperation. The publicity department then supplies the explanation about preventing loss of service.
The customers concerned reportedly hadn’t responded to communications about the change for two years. BT gave them five days’ notice of the proposed interruption. Their landlines and mobile services remained connected; telecare devices continued working. The pressure was applied through broadband. This was a limited interruption, with other services kept intact, but the means of obtaining a response was still the withdrawal of a service supplied under contract.
More than 80 percent of these previously unresponsive customers are understood to have subsequently taken the steps needed to switch. A success, then! The company has secured action. We can acknowledge the result without accepting the conclusion BT wants us to draw from it. A person can be made to act by the prospect of losing their internet. Where, in the figure of 80 percent, do we find proof that every household can complete the change safely?
BT has contacted these customers repeatedly. It has advertised, held local events and worked with partners. After two years without a reply, the customers are described as “unresponsive”. The word is convenient: it states a fact about the company’s communications and suggests a judgement about the people receiving them. They haven’t replied; therefore they must be made to reply. The network is being retired, certainly, and arrangements have to be made. But sending instructions for two years cannot establish whether the person receiving them has what is needed to carry them out. BT can count the communications. It still has to establish the circumstances of the customer.
“I’m getting increasing evidence that there is some bullying behaviour going on in order to try to force people to switch over,” says Dennis Reed, the founder of Silver Voices.
Reed has heard of customers being threatened with losing their broadband because they haven’t cooperated over a date for the landline change. He fears that the pressure to meet targets will leave people falling through the cracks. BT answers with its intentions. The company intends to prevent a loss of service. Its chosen means of securing action deserves examination all the same.
Across the industry, 16–17 million lines have already been moved from the old copper network to digital voice services, which use broadband. Openreach, the BT subsidiary maintaining the vast majority of Britain’s broadband and telephone network, says about 1.3 million copper-based landlines remain. The retirement date is the end of January 2027.
For most households the change is a matter of plugging the existing handset into the router instead of the socket on the wall. This accounts for the ease with which many people can change over. It tells us nothing about whether a person without broadband, or with an unreliable connection, can be provided with dependable telephone service by the same simple instruction. The easy cases have their requirements; the difficult cases have theirs. A programme which has dealt with the first still has to deal with the second.
Campaigners are concerned that those remaining on copper include older people with a landline and no internet, and rural households with poor or nonexistent broadband and variable mobile coverage. Some worry about calling the emergency services during a power cut. Here the customer’s concern is quite definite: will the telephone work when help is needed?
The publicity campaigns have enlisted Moira Stuart and Clare Balding. The company can name its campaigns and count its contacts. The household still needs an answer about its connection. Celebrity publicity cannot settle a problem of coverage, and repeating the retirement date cannot make a telephone work during a power cut.
Around two million people use telecare services, commonly pendant alarms and buttons which have traditionally relied on copper landlines. A device operating through the copper landline is unaffected when the internet goes down. For someone relying on that device, its continued operation is part of the work to be done in changing networks. Without it, the technical transfer can leave the person unable to summon help.
Virgin Media has already furnished an example. During its transitions in 2023, thousands of customers, typically older and disabled people, were left without access to their alarms. The company was fined £23.8 million. The customers needed their alarms while the alarms were unavailable; the fine arrived afterwards. There is a great difference between penalising a company for failing to provide a service and having that service available at the moment it is needed.
Problems affecting vulnerable customers have already caused a pause in non-voluntary migrations and a postponement of the retirement date. So the timetable can be changed. It has been changed. The difficulties were substantial enough to require more time, and the arrival of a new date will not itself complete the unfinished work.
Caroline Abrahams, Age UK’s charity director, says: “As the January 2027 deadline gets closer the telecoms providers should commit to ensuring that no older person is cut off if they haven’t yet switched. It should not mark a hard-and-fast cliff edge. We know that older people are overrepresented among those who are yet to switch.”
Notice who is overrepresented among the people still to be moved. The remaining work is becoming concentrated among people whose circumstances may require greater attention. At precisely this stage the companies are increasing the pressure to obtain action before the deadline. The demand to finish becomes more urgent as the cases still outstanding become more difficult. An unanswered communication can then be treated as the customer’s failure to cooperate, although the absence of an answer establishes no such explanation.
Here is the power of a capitalist monopoly in a quite ordinary transaction. Millions of households are linked through a common system maintained largely by BT’s subsidiary, but the customer has no control over the company’s decisions. BT controls the broadband connection; when it wants action over the landline, it can use the connection to get that action. The customer’s need, which the service is supposed to meet, becomes the company’s means of compulsion. The network requires coordinated work across society. Private ownership puts the power over access into the company’s hands.
With the network under social ownership and workers’ control, the labour and resources for its conversion could be directed according to the requirements of continued communication. A household without broadband would require a suitable service; a person unable to carry out the change would require assistance; an alarm would have to be confirmed to work before its old connection was withdrawn. Provision for unreliable connections and emergency calls during power cuts would belong in the plan. These are practical tasks. Advertising cannot perform them, and publicity about a deadline cannot take their place.
A socialist plan would have to account for those tasks in its timetable. The working telephone and the working alarm would be the test of whether the household had been successfully moved. A household unable to summon help would remain a case requiring work, whatever had been recorded about the transfer of its line.
BT can obtain a reply by threatening to interrupt broadband, and the reported response shows that the method has obtained action. It can also describe this as protection. Let the company repeat its explanation as often as it pleases: the customer has a contract, BT has the connection, and BT has used its control of that connection to bring the customer to terms. This is the power behind the helpful “pause”.
