The broadband ombudsman: the third-party route when complaints stall

ADR stands for alternative dispute resolution, which is a committee's way of saying "an independent referee". Under the Communications Act 2003, every provider selling broadband to consumers or to small businesses with ten employees or fewer must belong to an Ofcom-approved ADR scheme, and that scheme must be free for customers to use. There are two. The Communications Ombudsman was called Ombudsman Services until July 2023 and is run by the Trust Alliance Group. CISAS, the Communication and Internet Services Adjudication Scheme, is run by the dispute resolution body CEDR.

Both do the same job. An independent adjudicator reads your side, reads the provider's side, weighs the evidence and decides. It is not a court and it is not a regulator. It cannot fine the provider or punish it for being dreadful in a more general sense. What it can do is settle your dispute and order the provider to put things right, which for most households is the only bit that matters. The territory it covers is the everyday stuff: billing rows, contract terms, service quality, switching problems and compensation that never arrived.

You do not get to pick. Your provider's membership decides, and the split looks like this:

• Communications Ombudsman: BT, EE and Plusnet (all sitting under BT Group's membership), Hyperoptic, Community Fibre, Utility Warehouse, KCOM, Gigaclear, YouFibre, Toob, Trooli, Quickline and most of the smaller altnets.
• CISAS: Sky and NOW, Virgin Media, Vodafone, TalkTalk (including Shell Energy Broadband), Zen Internet, Andrews & Arnold and TrueSpeed.

There is one genuine trap in that list. Zen Internet, the provider everyone holds up as the home of old-fashioned customer service, sits with CISAS rather than the ombudsman people assume. Memberships do shift, so before you apply, check the ADR checker on Ofcom's scheme page or your provider's own complaints code, which has to name its scheme. Applying to the wrong one wastes a week and changes nothing else.

You cannot go to ADR on day one. The provider gets first crack at fixing the problem, and the waiting period is six weeks from the date you first complained. It used to be eight. Ofcom cut it to six for complaints raised on or after 8 April 2026, so if an agent tells you to wait two months, they are reading from last year's script. The six weeks applies to residential customers and small businesses alike.

There is a faster door. A deadlock letter is the provider confirming in writing that it has nothing more to offer, and holding one lets you escalate immediately, no six-week wait. You are entitled to ask for one. If the conversation has genuinely run out of road, asking "please issue me a deadlock letter" tends to concentrate minds, because the provider knows exactly what you plan to do with it.

First, make it formal. Phone calls evaporate. Put the complaint in writing, use the words "formal complaint" and keep the date, because that date starts the six-week clock. Say what went wrong, what it has cost you and what you want done about it. Name the rule you think has been broken if you can, because "you charged me an exit fee my contract does not allow" is much harder to wave away than "this is unfair".

Second, let the provider respond, and chase it once. If the answer is no, or the answer is silence, ask for a deadlock letter. Either you get one and escalate now, or you wait out the six weeks.

Third, build the file. Bills, emails, dates of calls, speed test results, missed engineer visits, the lot. Adjudicators decide on evidence, and the household that can show a dated paper trail beats "we have no record of that" every time.

Fourth, apply to your provider's scheme online. It is free and you do not need a lawyer. You set out the dispute and the remedy you want, the provider puts its side and the adjudicator decides.

Then the decision. If you accept it, it becomes binding on the provider, and the Communications Ombudsman gives the company 28 days to deliver the remedy. If you think the decision is wrong, you can reject it and keep every other option, including court. The provider gets no such choice. That asymmetry is the entire point of the scheme.

Money, mostly, plus orders to act. The Communications Ombudsman can award up to £10,000, and both schemes can order account credits, apologies and practical fixes: repair the fault, correct the bill, release you from the contract.

The cases that do well are the ones where the provider broke a clear rule. The automatic compensation that never appeared as a bill credit. A price rise that was never in the contract. An exit fee charged when you had a right to leave without paying one. A switch that collapsed and left the house offline for a fortnight. A connection that never reached the minimum speed your provider guaranteed at the point of sale.

Be honest with yourself about the weak cases too. ADR rules on whether the provider followed the rules and treated you fairly. It cannot rewrite a contract term you knowingly agreed to and now regret, and if the provider applied a rule correctly, the adjudicator will say so. The saving grace is the price of finding out. The worst outcome is a no that leaves you exactly where you started, minus an hour of form-filling.

There's more. You may never need the decision at all. A provider that has spent six weeks ignoring complaint reference 4471829 tends to rediscover its enthusiasm the moment an independent adjudicator asks it to explain itself in writing. Escalated cases have a habit of settling on terms the call centre swore were impossible a month earlier.

Escalation is the backstop, not the opening move. Most disputes are won earlier, by quoting the specific pricing and contract rule the provider has broken, and most switching problems resolve once the compensation owed is on the table. Know the rule first. Keep ADR in your back pocket for the provider that ignores it.