Ofcom blocks Openreach's £9.50 new-customer discount — a regulatory first

7 October 2026. The UK's telecoms regulator has done something it has never done before: ordered Openreach to withdraw a commercial offer before it launched. Ofcom's final decision, published on 28 September 2026, directs the country's dominant network operator to pull its "Incremental New to Openreach" offer — a wholesale discount worth up to £9.50 per customer per month for up to 30 months, which internet service providers would have earned for signing up extra new full-fibre customers. The charges, Ofcom concluded, are "not fair and reasonable" and could harm the network competition that keeps long-term prices down.

Why Ofcom stepped in

The offer paid ISPs a monthly discount only on new customers above their normal rate of sign-ups — a targeted incentive worth up to £285 per line over its full 30 months. Ofcom's concerns were twofold. First, the discount was large enough that other reasonably efficient operators could not match it while recovering their costs — the classic margin-squeeze pattern. Second, because it applied exclusively to new customers, it could have starved rival networks of the chance to grow at exactly the moment when, per Ofcom, around half of households with access to full-fibre broadband are yet to sign up. It is the first such intervention under the Telecoms Access Review 2026-31 framework, which came into force on 1 April 2026. Notably, Ofcom did not intervene in Openreach's other notified offers — including a one-off £50 discount in Virgin Media areas and a £19.32-a-month average price cap on new high-speed connections — judging their effective discounts far less substantial.

Why it matters beyond broadband

No phone numbers were touched — this is a wholesale broadband row. But the case shows how Ofcom now polices the wholesale market that business connectivity rides on: discounts from the dominant network that advantage one class of customer over another are challengeable under the new access rules. That discipline matters at a moment when wholesale has just concentrated further, with BT's rescue of TalkTalk and PXC folding a major independent wholesaler into BT Group. The practical takeaway is to keep supply options that do not depend on any single network owner. Businesses can port geographic or non-geographic numbers to an independent virtual number provider and run them over SIP on plans from free pay-as-you-go to £9.97 a month, while resellers source wholesale DID numbers provisioned independently of the big retail groups — our DID numbers guide explains how wholesale numbering fits in.

Related: BT buys TalkTalk and PXC out of administration · Ofcom's porting rules: how to keep your number