It is important for consumers to be able to switch providers quickly and easily, in order for them to exercise their choice and take advantage of competition in the communications sector.
This document sets out our view on the difficulties and costs that consumers face when they switch mobile services where they need to give notice to terminate their existing service. The effect of notice periods within the switching process is that many consumers end up paying for two services at the same time, even though they may not want this.
Our intention in this document is to enhance the mobile switching process reforms proposed in our March 2016 consultation with an additional proposal to address this issue.
We invite comments on our proposals from all interested parties.
Supporting calculations - cost of removing notice period charges (XLSX, 109.7 KB)
Update 31 January 2017
We received comments from several stakeholders on our assessment of costs and are now considering a number of revisions to our gross cost estimates for some of these proposals. We have also updated various assumptions used in the derivation of our cost estimates.
We invite any further comments on these assumptions in our publication on revised cost estimates.
