Summary

  • Ofcom's April–June 2026 complaint total fell from the previous quarter because pay-TV complaints declined. Fixed broadband, landline and pay-monthly mobile were flat.
  • The regulator publishes service-specific complaints per 100,000 customers and treats provider results less than one complaint apart on that scale as comparable.

The headline is down. Three of the four lines under it barely moved. In its 26 October release, Ofcom says complaints about the UK's main communications providers decreased in the second quarter of 2026. Pay-TV supplied the decrease. Complaints about fixed broadband, landline and pay-monthly mobile services stayed at their first-quarter levels. A reader looking for a broad improvement in telecom service has reached the wrong line of the chart.

The full quarterly report makes the division useful. Faults, service and getting connected were the main drivers of complaints in the three telecom categories; complaint handling led the pay-TV category. Compared with a year earlier, the relative complaint rate fell for broadband, landline and pay-TV, while monthly mobile was unchanged. The quarterly and annual comparisons answer different questions, and the report supplies both.

Ofcom's governing unit is a complaint reaching its own desks, shown for each service per 100,000 customers. Its 26 October methodology explains that providers and dispute-resolution schemes keep separate complaint streams. A customer can also raise more than one matter in a contact, and a bundle problem can enter more than one service column. The regulator publishes by service, so inventing one provider-wide score from those columns would throw away the accounting rules.

Even the league tables have a speed limit. Ofcom calls provider figures within one complaint per 100,000 customers comparable. The fixed-broadband group containing EE, Vodafone, TalkTalk and BT falls inside that band in Q2; so does the mobile pair O2 and Sky Mobile. The order of names on a list is a poor substitute for the regulator's own test of meaningful separation. Its dataset is meant to guide customers and inform monitoring and enforcement. The public deserves the split beneath the headline as prominently as the downward arrow.

Official sources