Mobile broadband while you wait for an installation: what it costs, and what you are owed for the wait

The short version, in a minute

Direct answer: Nobody gives you one. Three companies sell you one. And the delay itself pays more than it costs.

The question underneath this page is simple enough: your line is ordered, the date is weeks out, and you want to know whether the company you just gave your bank details to will tide you over. We read fifteen of them on their own websites rather than on anybody's summary of them.

Not one UK broadband provider publishes an offer of a temporary mobile connection to use while you wait for your installation. What every one of them publishes instead is cover for an outage on a service that already works, and the two things are not the same product for the same person.

If your line is live and it has broken, that is a different page and you are owed different money: our broadband downtime guide has the repair side of the scheme. If you are moving rather than waiting, our moving guide covers what nine providers charge to take a line with you.

What nobody will give you, in their own words

Direct answer: Four published devices, four triggers, and every one of them needs a line that already works.

Zen is the bluntest, and its policy is one of the few dated documents in this whole research: “The 4G backup service is intended solely for use as a backup solution in the event of an outage to your primary fixed line broadband service.” It even prices the alternative: “we reserve the right to charge you for the data usage at the rate of £4 per gigabyte or part gigabyte”

Vodafone's is included rather than sold, and the scope is in the sentence: “For the first 90 days after installation, our Broadband Xperts will actively be working in the background to make sure you're re-connected if you experience any outages.” Read the first four words again. The clock on it starts where this page's problem ends.

BT and EE both run the same shape of promise, and both put a gate in front of it. BT: “If you're a Halo customer and have reported a broadband affecting fault, we'll send you a Mini Hub if you're eligible.” EE: “If you have our Premium plan and report an eligible fault, we'll send you a 4G WiFi device at no extra cost.” A household with no line has no fault to report, so neither door opens.

The money for the wait, which almost nobody claims

Direct answer: A missed start date pays from the day it was missed. No qualifying wait, unlike a repair.

Here is Ofcom's trigger, and it is as plain as regulation gets: “If your provider promises to start a new service on a particular date but fails to do so.” The rate is “£6.46 for each calendar day of delay.”

A delayed start pays from the date that was missed. There is no qualifying period, which is the opposite of a repair, where nothing is owed until two full working days have passed. That difference is the single most useful thing on this page, and it is invisible to most people because the delayed start is the one trigger that only ever applies to somebody who is not a customer yet, and so is not reading their provider's help pages.

There is a ceiling, and the providers publish it rather than the regulator. Vodafone: “If we don't activate your service when we said we would (paid up to a maximum of 60 days from your original confirmed activation date).” BT publishes the same sixty days. At the published rate that is £387.60.

It does not arrive as money. Vodafone again: “If you're owed compensation, credit will be applied to your Vodafone account within 30 days of the issue being closed.” On a service that has not billed you yet, that is a credit waiting on an account you have barely opened, which is part of why so little of it is ever noticed.

Five providers where a late start is worth nothing

Direct answer: Ofcom's list is closed, and five of the fifteen we read are not on it.

Three, Community Fibre, Gigaclear, toob and YouFibre are absent from Ofcom's list of signatories, so a delayed start with any of them is worth nothing automatically. That is not an accusation about any of them. Ofcom publishes who has signed up and says nothing at all about anybody else, so the only honest thing to say about a company further down that picture is that it is absent, and absence has a consequence.

One of the five publishes its own answer to a slipped date instead. Gigaclear: “Most delays are resolved within 21 days, for complex repairs or where we need private land access for your installation, the process can take a little longer.” If you are on a network with no full fibre alternative, our rural guide covers which routes are open at an address like yours.

So the useful phone call is not the one asking for a dongle. It is the two minute one that establishes whether the company holding your order is one of the ten, because that single fact decides whether a six week slip is worth nearly four hundred pounds or nothing whatsoever.

The three you can actually buy for a short wait

Direct answer: Three, EE and Vodafone. Everybody else either sells fixed lines or sells SIMs.

Three, EE and Vodafone are the only UK companies selling mobile home broadband to consumers, and all three publish a short term option. O2 is unusually direct about not being one of them: “We don't offer home broadband as O2.” Most of the absences in this research are structural rather than stated, so a company saying it plainly is worth quoting.

What makes any of them usable for a wait is the term rather than the price. EE publishes “Available on 18 month minimum term or 30 day contract.” Vodafone's terms, versioned May 2026, publish “5G Broadband unlimited data plan with a Minimum Period of either a 30-day monthly rolling contract or 24-month contract as per your contract summary.” Three sells a one month plan, and its own words on leaving it are “As long as you provide us with 30 days' notice, you can cancel a 1-month broadband plan at any time, with no unexpected costs or fees”.

One thing to settle before you order rather than after. Only one of the three publishes what it charges if the hub does not come back: Vodafone lists “5G Broadband 5G Hub (Indoor) £120 inc. VAT” for the indoor unit and a higher figure for the outdoor one. Neither Three nor EE publishes an amount at all, which means you are agreeing to a charge nobody will quote you.

Three's one month plan, and why no price for it is here

Direct answer: The plan is real. Three's own three documents give three different answers about it.

Three's own home broadband product page offers 12 and 24 month plans only. The one month plan appears in its regulated price guide and on a separate no contract page, and the three documents do not agree on what it costs.

We are saying that carefully, so here is exactly what we did. The product page offers twelve and twenty four month plans and no shorter one. The no contract page says the one month plans carry no upfront cost, and shows no monthly price at all without a postcode. The regulated price guide carries a one month row, and that row did not read the same way on two independent extractions of the same PDF, with the upfront figure contradicting the no contract page either way.

How long the wait actually is

Direct answer: The wholesaler will not say. Two retailers will, and they disagree by nine days.

Openreach publishes what happens on installation day and how long the visit takes, and no figure at all for how long you wait to get one. It defers to the retailer for the date every time. Three of its pages were read for this guide. Between them they cover the drilling, the box on the wall, the testing and the tidying up, and none of them answers the only question a waiting household is actually asking.

Among the retailers, toob is the clearest of the fifteen: “We require a minimum of 5 days between the date you place an order with us and your installation.” Utility Warehouse publishes “We'll get your broadband switched within two weeks with zero installation and connection fees.” Those are the two ends of what anybody commits to in writing, and most of the rest commit to nothing.

Which brings the two halves of this page together. If the wait runs to a month and the date you were given has been missed, the scheme owes you more over those days than a rolling month of any of the three stopgaps costs. The arithmetic is ours. Both of the numbers in it are published.

How a claim gets refused, and a page that has not kept up

Direct answer: Three published exclusions, and one company quoting two different rates for the same right.

A delayed start pays automatically, which is not the same as unconditionally. BT publishes its exclusions plainly, and the first catches more people than the other two together: nothing is paid where “you weren't at the property to give access to the engineer at the appointment time”

The second is worth knowing before the phone call rather than after: “you didn't accept the earliest appointment date available at the time of rebooking”. Turning down an inconvenient slot because it does not suit the week can end the claim, so the useful move is to take the first date offered and rearrange your own diary around it. The third is the usual catch-all: “you break the terms and conditions of your service agreement”

What is worth doing in your situation?

Direct answer: Three questions, and five jobs sorted into the ones worth doing today and the ones that are not yours.

Work down the three in order. The first one reshapes everything after it, because whether your provider is one of Ofcom's ten decides whether the wait is worth hundreds of pounds or nothing at all.

Live broadband at your postcode

Direct answer: Whether an outage is worth anything depends on which providers reach your address.

The check below shows every provider that reaches the address, lowest price first. Before you choose, it is worth looking up whichever name you are drawn to against Ofcom's list of ten, because that is the difference between an outage that pays and one that does not.

What this page used to say, and why it changed

Direct answer: Three corrections, and the first one is repeated almost everywhere this subject is written about.

The old version of this page ran to twenty numbered sections without reading a single provider term or quoting a single regulator sentence. This version quotes Ofcom and seven companies on their own sites, and the three things it got wrong are below.

Broadband downtime when you work from home: frequently asked questions

In short

1. The question this page is named after has an answer nobody likes.
2. Not one UK broadband provider publishes an offer of a temporary mobile connection to use while you wait for your installation.
3. Fifteen were read on their own sites, not on anybody else's summary of them.
4. What they do publish is outage cover, and the difference is the whole point.
5. Zen writes it into the policy: “The 4G backup service is intended solely for use as a backup solution in the event of an outage to your primary fixed line broadband service.”
6. Vodafone scopes it to “For the first 90 days after installation, our Broadband Xperts will actively be working in the background to make sure you're re-connected if you experience any outages.”
7. BT needs a fault first: “If you're a Halo customer and have reported a broadband affecting fault, we'll send you a Mini Hub if you're eligible.”
8. EE needs the same: “If you have our Premium plan and report an eligible fault, we'll send you a 4G WiFi device at no extra cost.”
9. A household waiting for a first line cannot report a fault on it.
10. So the stopgap is yours to buy, and the market is small.
11. Three, EE and Vodafone are the only UK companies selling mobile home broadband to consumers, and all three publish a short term option.
12. O2 is blunt about not being one: “We don't offer home broadband as O2.”
13. EE publishes “Available on 18 month minimum term or 30 day contract.”
14. Vodafone publishes “5G Broadband unlimited data plan with a Minimum Period of either a 30-day monthly rolling contract or 24-month contract as per your contract summary.”
15. Three publishes a one month plan but not a price we can trust.
16. Three's own home broadband product page offers 12 and 24 month plans only. The one month plan appears in its regulated price guide and on a separate no contract page, and the three documents do not agree on what it costs.
17. Now the half almost nobody claims.
18. A missed start date pays “£6.46 for each calendar day of delay.”
19. Ofcom's trigger: “If your provider promises to start a new service on a particular date but fails to do so.”
20. A delayed start pays from the date that was missed. There is no qualifying period, which is the opposite of a repair, where nothing is owed until two full working days have passed.
21. Most people assume both triggers behave the same way. They do not.
22. Vodafone and BT both cap it: “If we don't activate your service when we said we would (paid up to a maximum of 60 days from your original confirmed activation date).”
23. Sixty days at the published rate is £387.60.
24. It arrives as a credit: “If you're owed compensation, credit will be applied to your Vodafone account within 30 days of the issue being closed.”
25. And then the catch that decides whether any of it applies.
26. Three, Community Fibre, Gigaclear, toob and YouFibre are absent from Ofcom's list of signatories, so a delayed start with any of them is worth nothing automatically.
27. On the length of the wait, the wholesaler says nothing useful.
28. Openreach publishes what happens on installation day and how long the visit takes, and no figure at all for how long you wait to get one. It defers to the retailer for the date every time.
29. toob is the clearest retailer: “We require a minimum of 5 days between the date you place an order with us and your installation.”
30. And the cheapest answer is sometimes Gigaclear's: “we recommend that you do not terminate the service from your existing broadband provider until your Gigaclear installation is complete and we activate your service”

Each line stands on its own and carries its date. Reviewed by a person at least quarterly, last on 5 October 2026.