Ofcom has drawn a chart of a bill that only goes down if you move. Twenty eight per cent of us are standing still, and paying seven to nine pounds a month for it

I keep coming back to one page of the Ofcom pricing report, because I have never seen a regulator publish something quite so honest about the thing it regulates.

It is a worked example. A customer signs up to broadband at a promoted price of £30 a month. Six months later it goes up by £4, to £34. Twelve months after that it goes up by another £4, to £38. That is what they are paying at the end of a two year contract.

Then the contract ends, and because promoted prices have kept falling, they can re-contract at around £27. Eleven pounds a month less than they were paying. Three pounds less than they signed up at two years earlier. Ofcom draws the line as flat in cash terms and falling once you allow for inflation.

And then it says the part that matters. Had the customer not engaged with the market and re-contracted or switched at the end of the minimum term, the trend in the price they paid would have been upwards.

So the benefit exists. It is conditional. It requires you to notice a date, understand what happens after it, and do something about it, roughly every two years, for the rest of your life.

Ofcom's own data says twenty eight per cent of fixed broadband customers were out of contract for at least one service in their bundle at the end of June last year, unchanged on the year before. Measured on what people actually spend rather than what is advertised, those customers were paying £7 a month more than in-contract customers for standalone broadband, £8 more for broadband with a landline, and £9 more for broadband, landline and TV together.

The interesting question is not why some people fail to switch. It is who they are.

Nineteen per cent of over-64s had switched any communications service in the past year, against twenty nine per cent of 25 to 44 year olds. Twenty one per cent of the poorest households, against twenty seven per cent of the richest. Sixty five per cent of over-64s said they felt confident comparing the costs of deals, against seventy seven per cent overall. On understanding the difference between full fibre and part fibre, seventy six per cent of men said they were confident and fifty per cent of women.

There is a second finding underneath that one, and it complicates the easy story. Most people are not failing to switch. They are declining to.

Around three in five customers agreed that even if they could save money on a different deal, they were happy enough with the one they had. That proportion has gone up since 2023, not down: broadband from fifty six to sixty three per cent, mobile from sixty seven to seventy one. About half or more said the savings would be too small to justify the time. Ofcom calls this significant given how low the barriers now are, and it is right to.

That is not ignorance. It is a judgement about what an hour of your evening is worth, made by people who have decided the answer is more than eight pounds a month.

Which leaves a market that works beautifully on paper and asks something of you that many people have looked at and declined.

There is a legal test of this coming. In November the Competition Appeal Tribunal certified a class action brought on behalf of customers who bought combined handset and airtime contracts, came to the end of their minimum term, and carried on paying the same price as during it. The claim alleges an anti-competitive abuse of a dominant position. Damages against BT are estimated at £418m, and at £1.4bn across all the mobile networks facing similar claims. BT filed its defence in February and says it will contest the case vigorously. Nothing has been proved and it may never be.

Meanwhile the rules changed to help. Since January 2025 providers must state any mid-contract rise in pounds and pence at the point of sale, rather than as inflation plus a percentage that nobody could calculate in advance. Ofcom's initial view is that this has given people more clarity.

It has also had an effect Ofcom names in its own report. Most providers moved to a flat increase regardless of package. So a customer on a basic £24.99 broadband deal faces a £3 rise, where the old inflation formula would have given them £1.60. A customer on a premium £67.99 package faces the same £3, where the formula would have given them £4.35. Ofcom writes that customers on cheaper packages are likely to face proportionally higher rises, and that as lower income customers may be more likely to take cheaper packages, this could mean they see higher than average percentage increases.

One more number, and I would put it above all the others. Across five broadband speed tiers, only one saw its price rise in real terms in the year to July 2025. It was the slowest, under 30 megabits, up seventeen per cent. Every faster tier fell. Ofcom notes it was not even the cheapest tier on the list.

The people on the worst connections in the country paid more for them. That is what a saving looks like when it is left to be collected.