Latest telecoms and pay-TV complaints revealed

Today we’ve published the latest figures for complaints we’ve received about the UK’s main landline, broadband, mobile and pay-TV providers.

The figures cover the period from July to September last year, during which time we saw a slight rise in complaints. Complaints about landline, broadband and pay-TV services all increased, while mobile complaints remained at similar levels.

Key trends from our complaints figures

• Virgin Media was the most complained-about provider across the broadband, landline and pay-TV categories, seeing significant rises across all these areas from the previous quarter.
• Alongside Virgin Media, NOW Broadband and TalkTalk received higher-than-average numbers of complaints in landline while NOW Broadband also received higher-than-average complaints in broadband.
• Sky continued to be the provider that attracted the fewest or joint fewest complaints per 100,000 subscribers across all four services we measure. This includes being the outright least complained-about provider in both broadband and landline.
• TalkTalk and Sky were the least complained-about pay-TV providers.
• O2 and BT Mobile were the most complained-about mobile operators. Complaints about O2 were primarily driven by how customers’ complaints were being handled while BT’s complaints were driven by customers’ experiences of changing provider. Sky Mobile, EE and Vodafone received the fewest complaints in the mobile sector.

A factor in Virgin Media’s complaints figures for this quarter was our announcement in July last year that we were launching an investigation into customers’ difficulties cancelling contracts and how it had handled complaints.

We acknowledge that this announcement could have prompted more customers to complain to us about Virgin Media, and that this could have been a contributing factor in its complaints volumes for the quarter covered by this report.

Commenting on the overall complaints data for this quarter, Fergal Farragher, Ofcom's Consumer Protection Director, said: “The slight increase in complaints on the previous quarter shows that providers must continue to focus on improving customer service.

“The launch of our investigation into Virgin Media in July, looking at difficulty cancelling and complaints handling, has led to more customers coming forward to share their experiences with us. Our investigation continues and updates will be published on our website.”

As the communications regulator, we compile this complaints data so we can better understand the reasons for dissatisfaction among telecoms customers. While we cannot deal with individual customer complaints, publishing this data gives consumers an insight into providers’ performance, which helps them to choose the right provider for their needs.

These charts provide more detail on the complaints we’ve received.