Broadband for pensioners: the telecare promise, the free battery back-up and the cheaper tariff are all real, and every one of them waits to be asked for

The short version, and what it does not claim

Direct answer: Every protection a pensioner is entitled to at the switchover is opt-in, and a provider cannot give it to somebody it does not know about.

Most pages written for older broadband customers are about speed, and speed is the easy half. A pensioner household usually needs less of it than the market assumes, the answer barely changes from one year to the next, and getting it wrong costs a few pounds a month. The expensive half is everything else on this page, and it has a property that nothing published about it makes obvious.

Three protections apply to a pensioner household at the digital switchover. Each is real, each is published by the body that requires it, and each of them is switched on by the customer rather than by the company. A telecare alarm is protected by a written promise from twelve providers, on condition that somebody confirms the alarm works. A battery back-up unit is free to anybody who depends on their landline, on condition that the provider knows they depend on it. A social tariff is available at any time and free of charge, on condition that the household asks whether it qualifies.

The first one is the one that matters most, because the thing at stake is not money. Twelve providers have promised in writing that no telecare user will be migrated without a working alarm being confirmed, and the only way they can keep it is if somebody tells them the alarm is there. That is not a loophole. A company cannot check an alarm it has never heard of, and the information about who wears a pendant in which kitchen exists only inside the house. Which is why four separate official bodies publish the instruction to the customer rather than to the industry, and why this page is built around a phone call.

The money works the same way. Seven in ten eligible households have never heard of a social tariff, moving to one is free and can be done mid-contract, and the benefit that usually opens the door is itself unclaimed by up to 910,000 families. The numbers behind that sentence are worth putting side by side before anything else. Two years on a social tariff rather than a standard package saves £347.76 on BT's own published prices. Two years of the Pension Credit that usually opens the door to it is £5,200. The tariff is worth having. The benefit is worth roughly fifteen times as much, and it is the same phone call that starts the conversation.

What this page does not claim is that anybody is being cheated. None of this is a scandal and most of it is a genuine improvement. The old network was failing, the charter is a real commitment with real signatures on it, the regulator's rules have been in force for eight years, and a social tariff is a good product honestly priced. What is wrong is that all of it waits to be asked for. The criticism here is narrow and it is about defaults: a protection that has to be requested reaches the households that know to request it, and the households least likely to know are the ones it was written for.

This is the eighth guide in this series. The others answer the questions next to this one: what a full house actually needs, why a contract outlives a tenancy, which technology to buy, whose network you are on, what a video call really needs, what decides your ping and where the streaming ceiling is.

The alarm your provider has not been told about

Direct answer: Twelve providers have signed a promise about telecare. The promise has a condition in the middle of it, and the condition is you.

The Public Switched Telephone Network Charter was updated on 22 January 2026 and twelve companies have put their names to it: Ogi, BT, Virgin Media O2, Sky, TalkTalk Consumer, Vodafone, KCOM, Zen Internet, Broadband for the Rural North, Immervox, Digital Space and Utility Warehouse. Its telecare commitment reads as follows.

“No telecare users will be migrated to digital landline services without us, the customer, or the telecare company confirming that they have a compatible and functioning telecare solution in place.”

Public Switched Telephone Network Charter, updated 22 January 2026

Read that sentence twice, because the second half of it is doing all the work. The promise is not that telecare users will be identified. It is that no telecare user will be moved until the provider, the customer or the telecare company has confirmed a working solution is in place. Two of those three parties can only confirm something they already know about. If nobody has ever told the provider that there is a pendant in the house, the household is, on the company's records, not a telecare household at all.

The scale of that gap is the reason the charter exists. The Telecare National Action Plan puts it at “An estimated 2 million people in the UK currently use telecare services”, and records the technical problem underneath it, which is that “devices designed to operate on analogue landlines have a higher rate of failure when they are connected to digital telephone landlines”. So this is not a theoretical risk about a device that might behave oddly. It is a known failure mode with a known population attached to it.

What makes the pattern unmistakable is that four different official bodies, writing separately and for different reasons, all give the same instruction, and all of them give it to the household rather than to the company.

There is a second commitment in the same charter that says more about the state of the records than any statistic could. Its signatories have undertaken this: “We will conduct additional checks on customers who have already been non-voluntarily migrated to ensure they do not have telecare devices we were unaware of, and if they do, ensure suitable support is provided.” That is a promise to go back through customers who were already moved and look for devices nobody knew were there. A company does not write that sentence unless it knows the first pass missed people.

And there is a third, which is the strongest line in the document: “We will not undertake any non-voluntary migrations to digital landlines, until we have full confidence that we are taking all possible steps to protect vulnerable people through the migration process.” A non-voluntary migration is one the household did not ask for, and the signatories have agreed to stop doing them until they are confident about the protections. All three commitments point the same way. The industry has accepted that the risk is real. What it cannot do is find the devices on its own.

If the alarm came from a council or a housing association, ring them too, because they hold the contract with the monitoring centre and will know whether the unit is a digital model. Our guide to broadband for a full house covers the household side of the same conversation, and the postcode comparison shows which providers can actually reach the address.

What actually changes, and what it takes away

Direct answer: The phone moves from the wall socket to the router. Almost everything about that is an improvement, except one thing.

The old telephone network is being retired. Ofcom writes the date as a company's plan rather than as a law: “BT plans to retire its old landline network by 31 January 2027.” Openreach words it more firmly: “By 31 January 2027, all traditional phone lines will be going digital.” Both are worth knowing, because the difference between them explains why some households have been moved already and others have heard nothing. Most of the country is through it: “Over two thirds of UK landlines have already been upgraded to VoIP.”

It is also worth knowing why it is happening, because the reason is usually left out and it changes how the whole thing reads. Openreach publishes the state of the old network: “2024 saw a 45% increase in the number of PSTN incidents reported. In 2024/25 there were over 2,600 major incidents on the PSTN.” That is a network failing more often each year. The switchover is a repair, not a sales exercise.

For most households the practical change is small and mostly good. Call quality improves. The handset plugs into the back of the router instead of into the socket on the skirting board. Numbers are kept. Most existing corded and cordless phones work unchanged. The bill does not rise because of the switch itself.

One thing genuinely goes, and the Government publishes it plainly: “Digital landlines cannot carry a power connection, which means handsets and routers must be powered from your home power supply, and they will not function in a power cut unless you have a backup power system.” The old copper pair carried its own power from the exchange, which is why a corded telephone worked when the lights were out. A digital line cannot do that, because the router in the hall needs mains electricity like everything else.

That matters more in some houses than in others. A household with several mobiles and good signal has a fallback and barely notices. A household where the landline is the only phone, or where a pendant alarm dials out through it, has lost the one thing that used to work regardless. The remedy for that is free and it is the next section.

The other thing to check is what else is plugged into the line, because it is rarely just the telephone. Openreach publishes the list: “Devices connected to your phone line may be affected. This can include alarms, CCTV, payment terminals, telecare devices, health monitoring equipment, door entry systems and lift phones.” In a pensioner household the ones that come up most often are a personal alarm, a door entry system in a block of flats, and a monitored smoke alarm. A lift phone matters to anybody in a building with one, and it is usually the freeholder's responsibility rather than any individual leaseholder's.

Our guide to full fibre, FTTC, cable, 4G and 5G explains what is actually arriving at the house, and how to tell which network your provider uses covers who owns the line behind the brand on the bill.

If the line has already been switched

Direct answer: A household moved before anybody asked about an alarm is exactly who the charter's fifth commitment was written for.

Plenty of households are reading this after the event rather than before it. Over two thirds of UK landlines have already moved, most of them without incident, and a good number of them without anybody ever being asked what was plugged into the socket. That is not a reason to leave it alone. It is the situation the industry has explicitly promised to go back and fix.

The charter's fifth commitment is the one to quote: “We will conduct additional checks on customers who have already been non-voluntarily migrated to ensure they do not have telecare devices we were unaware of, and if they do, ensure suitable support is provided.” A non-voluntary migration is one the household did not request, and the signatories have agreed both to check those customers and, in the meantime, to stop making more of them: “We will not undertake any non-voluntary migrations to digital landlines, until we have full confidence that we are taking all possible steps to protect vulnerable people through the migration process.” A company that has signed both sentences cannot reasonably tell a customer that the question is closed because the line has already changed.

A working alarm today is not proof that everything is fine. The Telecare National Action Plan's finding is about reliability rather than about a device refusing outright: “devices designed to operate on analogue landlines have a higher rate of failure when they are connected to digital telephone landlines”. A higher rate of failure means a device that answers a test call in September can still fail in February, which is why the monitoring centre's own test matters more than a one-off check at home.

Flats and sheltered housing deserve their own paragraph, because the affected equipment is often not in the household at all. Openreach's list is broader than the telephone: “Devices connected to your phone line may be affected. This can include alarms, CCTV, payment terminals, telecare devices, health monitoring equipment, door entry systems and lift phones.” In a block, the door entry panel, the lift phone and sometimes a communal alarm all sit on lines that belong to the freeholder or the managing agent rather than to any individual leaseholder. Nobody living in the building is billed for them, and nobody living in the building is told when they change.

So the call for a flat has a second leg to it. Ask the managing agent or the housing provider, in writing, what has been done about the door entry system and the lift phone, and keep the reply. It is a reasonable question, the answer costs them nothing, and a building where nobody has asked is a building where the answer is usually that nobody has looked.

One more group is worth naming: households where the person who understood the paperwork has died, and the bill is still arriving in their name. That is a difficult call to make and it is worth making anyway, because it sits across three separate problems on this page. The account is not in the name of the person receiving the benefit, so a social tariff will be refused. The nominated contact on the account is somebody who can no longer be reached. And the telecare record, if there ever was one, is attached to the wrong person. All three are repaired on the same phone call, and the provider will have a bereavement team whose entire job is that conversation.

None of this requires a complaint or an argument. Every commitment quoted here was published voluntarily by the companies themselves, and the staff answering the phone can look all of it up. The only thing that does not happen by itself is somebody dialling the number.

The free back-up you have to ask for

Direct answer: Ofcom requires your provider to offer a battery back-up, free, to anybody who depends on the landline. It is offered to people the provider knows about.

This is the regulator's answer to the power cut problem, and it is a requirement rather than a courtesy: “If you depend on your landline, your provider must offer you, for free, a back-up solution such as a battery back-up unit for your home.” The words to hold on to are for free. There is no charge for the unit, no charge for fitting it, and no charge on the bill afterwards.

The charter signatories have committed to better than the regulator's floor: “Where battery back-up solutions are provided, we will work to provide solutions that go beyond the Ofcom minimum of 1 hour of continued, uninterrupted access to emergency services in the event of a power outage.” One hour is Ofcom's minimum for continued access to the emergency services, and the twelve companies have agreed to work past it. What any individual provider actually supplies varies, so the question on the call is worth asking directly: how long does your back-up unit last, and does it cover the alarm as well as the phone?

Two practical points that the published guidance does not make. A back-up unit keeps the router alive, so it keeps the broadband alive too, which means an alarm that dials out over the internet keeps working as well. And the unit needs somewhere to live near the router with a socket of its own, so it is worth looking at where the router sits before the engineer arrives.

If the household has a mobile as well, keep it charged and keep the number written down somewhere a visitor could find it. That is not a substitute for the back-up unit, and it is not what the regulator asks for, but a power cut is exactly the moment when nobody can remember where the charger is.

The register, and what counts as vulnerable

Direct answer: Being recorded as a vulnerable customer is what makes a provider treat your line differently. It is a sentence on a phone call.

Ofcom's rules here are not new and they are not guidance. They are General Conditions C5.1-5.5, which came into force in October 2018, and have bound every provider in the UK ever since. What they require is that a provider identifies customers who may need extra help and then actually gives it: checking before it changes a service, handling faults differently, and making sure a household is not left without a way to call for help.

The word vulnerable puts people off, and the regulator's own definition is much broader than the everyday sense of it. Ofcom lists “physical or mental health problems, specific characteristics such as age or literacy skills, or changes in personal circumstances such as bereavement, job loss or changes in household income”, and adds a sentence that is worth quoting to anybody who says the register is not meant for them: “Anybody can face circumstances that lead to them becoming vulnerable - temporarily or permanently.”

It is worth adding a nominated contact at the same time, because it solves a problem that turns up constantly in pensioner households: an adult child who is trying to sort out a fault and is told, correctly, that the company cannot discuss the account with them. Authorising a relative takes a minute on the same call and saves hours later.

One thing to avoid while doing it. Do not move the account into a relative's name to make life simpler, because of a rule in the next section: the person receiving the benefit has to be the main person on the contract for a social tariff. An account quietly transferred to a son or daughter is one of the few ways to lose an entitlement that was otherwise sitting there.

The cheaper tariff, and what it is worth

Direct answer: A social tariff is the same broadband at a lower price. Seven in ten eligible households have never heard of one.

Ofcom's finding is the one number that explains why this section exists: “70% of eligible households were unaware of social tariffs in October 2025, and take-up is low as a proportion of eligible households (less than 9%).” Almost nine in ten eligible households are not on a tariff that is sitting there waiting for them, and the largest single reason is that nobody has told them it exists.

The market has changed sharply while that was happening. Ofcom: “Broadband social tariff options had grown from just three in 2020 to more than 30 by December 2025.” and “Current prices range from £10 to £24.” In June it counted the take-up directly: “In June 2025, 532,000 customers were using a fixed or mobile broadband social tariff, an annual increase of 26,000 (5%).” Half a million households, against a pool of eligible households many times larger.

The clearest worked example for a pensioner household is BT's, because BT publishes both halves of it. The price: “Home Essentials Fibre broadband plans start from £16.50 with no set-up fees.” And the part that most comparisons miss, from BT's own terms: “The monthly price of the Home Essentials package will not increase from March every year by a monetary amount.” Every other BT package rises each March by a set amount. The social tariff does not, which means the gap between the two widens over a contract rather than staying still.

Two other tariffs are worth knowing by name. Virgin Media's Essential Broadband is £12.50 a month on a rolling 30-day contract, and its eligibility check needs no paperwork at all, only permission: “With your consent, we'll check your details with the Department of Work and Pensions, and confirm whether you qualify”. Hyperoptic's Fair Fibre Plan is £13 a month and no commitment, just 30 days' notice, which buys rather more speed than the other two for a couple of pounds more.

The part that stops people asking is a fear of being trapped, and it is misplaced in both directions. Ofcom on getting in: “If your provider offers a social tariff, you can switch to it at any time, free of charge.” And on getting out: “It costs nothing to leave. You won't pay a fee to leave the tariff before the end of your contract.” No exit fee to join, no exit fee to leave, and no waiting for a contract to end first.

Not every provider offers one. TalkTalk and Plusnet publish no social tariff, and neither appears in Ofcom's list of providers that offer one. For a household with either of those, Ofcom's position is weaker but still useful: “If your provider doesn't offer a social tariff, you can switch to one that does. Your provider might let you leave your current contract without paying a penalty fee.” Might let you is doing a great deal of work in that sentence, so the honest advice for a TalkTalk or Plusnet customer is to ask what leaving would cost before assuming it is free.

And one absence belongs here rather than in a footnote. Sky's social tariff page could not be read: its body is generated in the browser and returned nothing on three attempts, so nothing from it is quoted, counted or inferred here. Sky signed the telecare charter and appears in Ofcom's own list of providers offering a social tariff, so the product exists; this page simply will not put a price or a condition on it that it could not read.

Keep one date in mind once you are on it. BT publishes that “we'll run another eligibility check on your plan's 12 month anniversary”, and other providers do something similar. If circumstances change and the household stops qualifying, the account moves to the standard package and the annual rise starts applying again, so a re-check letter is worth opening rather than filing.

Where the eligibility lists disagree

Direct answer: The eligibility lists disagree with each other and nobody tells the customer. BT and EE write Pension Credit (Guarantee Credit). Virgin Media, Vodafone and Hyperoptic write Pension Credit and stop there.

This is the finding on this page that is least likely to be written anywhere else, and it decides real cases. BT's published eligibility list reads “Universal Credit (all claimants), Pension Credit (Guarantee Credit), Employment and Support Allowance, Jobseeker's Allowance, Income Support”, and Virgin Media's reads “Universal Credit, Pension Credit, Income Support, Income-based Jobseeker's Allowance or Income-based Employment Support Allowance”. The second item on each is the same benefit, and only one of the two has a bracket after it.

Pension Credit has two parts, and the Government publishes why that bracket matters: “You might still get some Savings Credit even if you do not get the Guarantee Credit part of Pension Credit.” So there is a real population of households on Savings Credit alone. On BT's and EE's published wording they do not qualify. On Virgin Media's, Vodafone's and Hyperoptic's wording they do, because those three write the benefit unqualified and stop there.

There is also a route that needs no Pension Credit at all, and it is the most useful line in this whole research for a pensioner household. Hyperoptic publishes a second eligibility list, which includes “Attendance Allowance, Care Leavers' Support, Housing Benefit, Personal Independence Payment”. Attendance Allowance is a pension-age benefit and it is not means-tested, so a household with savings and an occupational pension, which would fail every income test on the first list, can qualify through the second one.

Nobody advertises that. It appears on a provider's own page, below the list everybody reads, and it is the difference between a social tariff being a benefits product and a social tariff being available to a much wider group of older households. If anybody in the house receives Attendance Allowance, or Personal Independence Payment, it is worth asking on that basis specifically.

The honest caveat is that eligibility lists change without notice and none of the pages quoted here carries a date of its own. Every one of them was read on 24 September 2026. The pattern, that the lists disagree and that a refusal is worth a second opinion, is more durable than any individual line on them.

The gate behind the gate

Direct answer: Pension Credit opens the door to almost every social tariff. Up to 910,000 families entitled to it are not claiming it.

Everything in the section above assumes the household already receives the benefit. For a large number of households that assumption is wrong, and the reason is the same one as everywhere else on this page: the benefit is claimed rather than awarded.

The Government describes it simply: “Pension Credit gives you extra money to help with your living costs if you're over State Pension age and on a low income.” The Department for Work and Pensions publishes the take-up rate alongside it, which is that “62% of those entitled to Pension Credit claimed the benefit in FYE 2024”. That leaves, in the Department's own words, “up to 910,000 families who were entitled to receive PC did not claim the benefit”, and “up to £2.5 billion of available PC went unclaimed” in total.

Per household the Department puts the average at around £2,600 per year. Over the two years of a typical broadband contract that is £5,200, set against the £347.76 the tariff itself saves over the same period. The broadband saving is worth having. It is not the reason to make the claim.

A Pension Credit award also tends to carry other things with it, which is why the gap between around £2,600 per year and what a household actually gains is usually wider than the headline. It is the qualifying benefit for a range of other support, and it is the benefit most social tariffs key off. One claim, several consequences.

This is a broadband comparison site rather than a benefits adviser, so the boundary here is deliberate: this page can tell you that the benefit exists, that most social tariffs key off it, what the Department publishes about how many people miss it, and that it is worth checking. What it cannot do is tell you whether any particular household qualifies. For that, the Government's own Pension Credit calculator and a local Citizens Advice are the right places, and both are free.

What not asking costs over two years

Direct answer: Two figures, both from published sources, and one of them is fifteen times the other.

Putting the whole page into one sum is the clearest way to see the shape of it. Take a household entitled to both a social tariff and Pension Credit, and claiming neither, and follow it for the two years of an ordinary broadband contract.

Three cautions belong with that table and none of them changes the conclusion. The broadband rows assume the household stays eligible for the full two years and that BT's published rises land as published. The Pension Credit row is an average across every entitled family rather than a figure for any particular one, so a real household could be well above it or well below. And a household on a social tariff and claiming Pension Credit would not receive £5,547.76 in cash; it is what an entitled household that asks for neither goes without.

What the table does show reliably is the ranking. If a pensioner household is going to make one enquiry this year, the benefit is the one to make it about, and the broadband saving arrives behind it as a consequence rather than as the prize.

It is also worth saying what is not in the table, because it is the part of this page that has no price on it. A telecare alarm that keeps working through the switchover, and a phone that still reaches an ambulance in a power cut, are not worth £347.76 or £5,200. They are the reason the phone call is worth making even for a household that qualifies for nothing at all.

The call itself, word for word

Direct answer: Make one phone call to your provider, and say two things: whether anybody in the house has an alarm or pendant of any kind, and that you want to know whether you qualify for a social tariff. Both are free, both take minutes, and neither happens on its own.

Everything above reduces to one conversation with the company named on the bill. It is free, it takes about five minutes, and the number is on the bill or on the provider's contact page. What follows is what to say, in the order that works.

Write the reference number on the back of the most recent bill and keep it. It is the only evidence that the conversation happened, and the one thing that turns a disputed switchover into a two-minute call rather than a complaint.

Two things to have to hand before dialling. The account number, which is on the bill. And the names of the benefits the household receives, exactly as they appear on the award letters, because Pension Credit (Guarantee Credit) and Pension Credit are treated as different answers by different companies and a rough answer can get a household turned down for something it qualifies for.

If the person on the other end has not heard of the telecare commitment, ask to be put through to somebody who has, and say the words Public Switched Telephone Network Charter. It is a published document with the company's own name on it, and every signatory's staff can look it up.

And if the call does not go well, the complaint route is published. Raise it with the provider first, ask for it to be logged as a formal complaint, and if it is not resolved the provider must tell you which alternative dispute resolution scheme it belongs to and how to take it there. That is a regulatory requirement rather than a favour.

What the line actually has to do

Direct answer: A two-person household that watches television and makes video calls is served by well under a hundred megabits. The speed is rarely the problem.

This is the shortest section on the page, and it is short on purpose. A pensioner household is usually one or two people, and the demand on a broadband line comes from the number of things using it at once rather than from anybody's age. The published figures make that concrete.

Take the heaviest ordinary use, which is streaming. Netflix publishes “15 Mbps or higher” for its highest quality, and “3 Mbps or higher” for standard high definition. Sky states “Minimum speed: 25Mbps” for ultra-high definition. YouTube publishes 20 Mbps for the same thing. Two televisions running at once, on the highest published figure of the three, come to well under a hundred.

Video calls need less again, and they need something different. Webex publishes “3.0 Mbps to send and 2.5 Mbps to receive” for a high-definition call. Not one of the four numbers the vendors publish for what ruins a call is a speed. They are jitter, packet loss, round trip time and, in Cisco's case, whether you are on Wi-Fi. What actually ruins a call to a grandchild is a wireless signal that does not reach the back bedroom, or a router hidden in a cupboard, neither of which a faster package repairs.

Which is why the honest advice for most pensioner households is to buy the cheapest package that comfortably covers the televisions in the house, and to spend the difference on nothing at all. A social tariff at fifteen megabits is thin for two televisions in ultra-high definition at once; a social tariff at a hundred and fifty, which Hyperoptic publishes at £13 a month and no commitment, just 30 days' notice, is more than most of these households will ever use.

Two things are worth more than speed in a house like this. A router positioned in the open, near the middle of the home rather than behind a television in the front room. And, if the signal will not reach, a mesh unit or a pair of powerline adapters, which cost less than a year of the difference between two packages.

Our guide to broadband for streaming sets out what the services themselves publish, broadband for home working covers what a video call really needs, and minimum guaranteed download speed explains the figure a provider is actually committing to.

Which route fits your household

Direct answer: Three routes, and which one applies is decided by which benefit the household receives rather than by what it wants.

The sections above set out the entitlements. This one puts them in order for a particular household, because the right answer differs sharply depending on one piece of information that only the household has.

Two rules cut across all four. The account has to be in the name of the person receiving the benefit, which Ofcom states plainly: “The person receiving the benefit needs to be the main person on the contract.” And whatever route applies, the telecare conversation is separate from all of it, because an alarm is protected by a charter rather than by a tariff and the protection does not depend on income.

One honest tie-break for a household that qualifies for a tariff and is also being offered a cheap introductory price on the open market. The introductory price is usually cheaper for a year and then rises; the social tariff is usually cheaper across a whole contract and, in BT's case, is exempt from the annual rise altogether. Compare across twenty four months rather than across the first twelve, and the answer changes more often than people expect.

Getting it set up, and getting help afterwards

Direct answer: Ask for the engineer visit, ask for the nominated contact, and ask for the accessible format. All three are free and none is offered unprompted.

A switchover, a new provider or a new router all end in the same place: somebody has to plug things in and the phone has to work afterwards. Most of what makes that easy is published, and almost none of it appears on the order page.

The nominated contact is the one people wish they had set up earlier. Authorising a relative or a neighbour to speak about the account takes a minute on the phone, and it is the difference between a fault being fixed on the day and a fortnight of being told the company cannot discuss the account. It does not give that person control of the money, and it can be withdrawn at any time.

Keep three things written down somewhere a visitor could find them: the provider's name and the account number, the reference number of the call where the alarm was recorded, and the number of the alarm's monitoring centre. Between them they answer almost every question anybody will be asked in a hurry.

If something goes wrong, the escalation route is published rather than discretionary. Raise it with the provider, ask for it to be logged as a formal complaint, and get the reference. If it is not resolved, the provider must tell you which alternative dispute resolution scheme it belongs to and how to take the complaint there. A household recorded as needing extra help has stronger footing in that process, which is another reason to make the record before anything goes wrong rather than after.

And one practical thing that costs nothing. When the router is installed, ask the engineer to write the wireless name and password on a card and leave it beside the router, rather than relying on the sticker on the underside of a box that will end up behind a bookcase.

Write the provider's own telephone number on the same card while you are at it. It is printed on every bill, it is the number that every entitlement on this page runs through, and it is the one number that is never to hand at the moment somebody needs it.

Our guides to setting broadband up for an older relative and the simplest setups cover the practical side in more detail.

Broadband at your postcode