Why is broadband switching so hard?

Download a song, email a friend, send a video to granny - it should all be so simple in our brave new technological world with broadband internet.

More than half the households in Britain have taken the plunge already, with BT alone grabbing four million subscribers in a market worth upwards of £1bn a year.

But try to take advantage of the temptingly low prices for high-speed services by switching from one provider to another, and all of a sudden things are not so easy.

The situation has become so bad that watchdog Ofcom is about to produce a report that will be fiercely critical of the companies' tactics to stall defections.

Karen Darby, founder of simplySwitch. com, which advises consumers on switching utilities and broadband services, says one of the companies' tactics is for call centre workers to be given bonuses to put off customers who want to switch.

Ofcom claims to be doing its best but admits problems remain.

One huge difficulty has been providers refusing to hand over the special Migration Authorisation Code (Mac) needed by customers who want to change.

Brian Holm, 70, and his wife, Elizabeth, 69, of Workington, Cumbria, said they experienced this frustration when they tried to switch their broadband supplier from AOL to Tiscali.

'We needed the Mac, but what a kerfuffle,' said Elizabeth. 'Brian could not get off the phone it just went on so long. The man told us we didn't need the code.'

The Holms now have to wait four weeks for the service to be switched. By contrast, changing their electricity and gas supplier took five minutes with an nPower representative in a local supermarket. Ofcom says it is looking closely at the problems. Last week, it fined service provider Prodigy £30,000 for failing to provide information about how it was complying with the Mac rules.

'We acted in February to make service providers hand over Macs to consumers who wanted to switch,' an Ofcom spokesman said. But Darby and other experts say that new barriers have simply been thrown up.

'I am a victim of this,' said Darby, whose company is owned by The Mail on Sunday's parent company,. 'Dropping my Tiscali service involved being passed around a dozen phone operators before ending up where I started.'

Virgin Media, which has come in for much criticism for its customer service, has a single number for customers to dial. But once they have rung the 0845 line, the problems start, with difficult menus and long queues.