Business broadband switching gets cheaper but still lacks a live date

The One Touch Switching Company (TOTSCo) has cut the price of its business switching service for the second time in two months. Bulletin 108, dated 21 April, reduces the unit price from £1.70 to £1.60 per business customer and removes all charges for communications providers with fewer than 20,000 customers until the service goes live. TOTSCo says prices will not change again in 2026, that the 2027 price should be no higher than £1.60 and, in a non-binding indication, that it expects the price to fall by around 50% from 2028, once its development costs are recovered.

The not-for-profit, industry-funded company runs the hub behind One Touch Switch, the gaining-provider-led process that lets residential customers move broadband and landline services between providers on different networks. It has been preparing a version for business customers: in April 2025 its chief executive, Paul Bradbury, said planning was “focused on a go-live in early 2026”. A year later, the service is moving into integration testing, and neither Bulletin 108 nor Bradbury’s blog post of 17 April gives a date for live operation.

For the small and mid-sized firms that buy business broadband and phone lines, the price of a switching hub is invisible. What matters is whether moving supplier is getting easier, and when – at a time when many of them are being forced to change their lines anyway.

What TOTSCo has changed

The April cut is the latest step in a falling price list. TOTSCo published its first business switching prices in May 2025. In March 2026 it cut the unit price from £1.77 to £1.70, set an annual subscription of £350 per brand and introduced a sliding scale for providers with fewer than 5,000 business customers: a brand with 500 customers pays 10% of the full unit price. The April bulletin goes further for smaller operators, charging nothing below 20,000 customers before launch.

TOTSCo’s explanation is arithmetic. “As more providers opt in, costs are shared across a wider group of users, improving affordability for everyone,” its bulletin says. In a blog post on 17 April, Bradbury said the company was “now kicking off the Business Switching Testing Group as we move into integration testing”, the stage at which providers test with each other ahead of live operation, and that smaller providers could onboard and test at no cost.

Using TOTSCo’s hub for business switching is optional. TOTSCo has described business switching as a competitive market in which providers can use different solutions to meet their obligations, and the process itself is designed by a separate industry steering group.

Why the timing matters for business customers

Ofcom has made clear that the obligation already exists. In a blog post of 3 October 2025, TOTSCo quoted the regulator as reminding providers that they have been required since April 2023 to deliver gaining-provider-led switching for business customers as well as residential ones, and that “doing nothing in relation to the switching of business customers is unlikely to be a sustainable approach to meeting your obligations under the General Conditions.”

The residential service shows what a common hub can do once it is running. TOTSCo says 1.6 million consumers switched in the first year of One Touch Switch, and by then it had more than 340 providers in its directory. Business connections are harder. As ISPreview has pointed out, they can carry longer contracts and service level agreements, and may lack some of the protections residential customers get.

The delay coincides with a forced migration of business lines. BT Group plans to retire its copper public switched telephone network (PSTN) by 31 January 2027. In February Openreach said roughly 2.8 million lines still needed to move, more than half a million of them serving business premises, and that wholesale line rental prices would rise by 20% on 1 April, a further 40% on 1 July and a final 40% on 1 October 2026, effectively doubling 2025 rates. It warned that smaller or specialist providers had been slower to migrate customers.

“If your provider hasn’t contacted you, you need to ask why,” said James Lilley, director of all-IP at Openreach, in that announcement. For a small business on a legacy line whose provider has gone quiet, the logical response is to move – which is exactly the moment a working gaining-provider-led process would help most.

What business buyers should do

The fee waiver is likely to bring more small providers into testing, and the fixed 2026 price removes one reason for delay. But a cheaper hub does not switch anyone. Until providers are live, a business that wants to move will still depend on how well its old and new suppliers cooperate, and on the contract it signed.

Businesses reviewing their lines before the PSTN deadline should ask a prospective provider three things: whether it is onboarding to TOTSCo’s hub or another switching solution, when it expects to switch business customers through it and what happens to numbers and services while the move is under way. They should also check the notice periods and early termination charges in their current contract before they start, because a faster process will not shorten a minimum term.

The verdict on April’s announcement is simple. TOTSCo has made it cheaper for providers to join. The test for business customers is not the unit price but whether, by the time copper lines are switched off in January 2027, changing supplier is any easier than it was when the rules were introduced in 2023.