The contract you didn't really get to read

If you’ve ever signed a business phone or broadband deal and later found the contract didn’t match what you were told, you’re in very large company. This isn’t a you-should-have- read-it problem. It’s a the-industry-is-built-this-way problem — and the regulator has the fines to prove it.

When the biggest provider in the country gets fined for it

In May 2024, Ofcom fined BT — including its EE and Plusnet brands — £2.8 million. The reason: it had failed to give around 1.1 million customers clear, simple contract information and the required one-page contract summary beforethey signed up. Those are rules Ofcom brought in on 17 June 2022 (General Conditions C1.3 to C1.7) precisely so that people could see, in plain terms, what they were agreeing to before they agreed to it. BT was ordered to refund affected customers’ early exit fees, and Ofcom said the size of the fine reflected the “seriousness of this breach”.

Sit with that for a second. The single largest, most established name in UK telecoms — fined millions for not showing more than a million customers what they were signing. If that’s happening at the top of the market, you can imagine what the contracts look like further down it.

The gap between the pitch and the page

A BBC News investigation in 2025 put a number on the human cost of this. It heard from more than 160 small business owners who said they were locked into contracts they couldn’t afford, often after a sales pitch that didn’t match the paperwork. The BBC filmed one pitch where the salesperson said things out loud that simply weren’t in the written contract:

• “The monthly price is fixed” — while the contract allowed it to rise by thousands after the first year.
• “The upgrade wipes your old contract” — while customers kept paying for the original equipment.
• “After five years you’ll own the equipment” — while the contract said it was rented.

(The company filmed in that investigation denies mis-selling, says it is transparent about prices, and says such historic cases relate to less than 1% of its customers.) The lesson stands regardless of any one firm: the written contract is what binds you, so a promise that lives only in the salesperson’s mouth is worth nothing.

Why “sign today” is the trap

Here’s the bit that catches small businesses specifically. At home, you usually get a cooling-off period — a window to change your mind. Your businessgenerally doesn’t. Most B2B telecoms contracts have no statutory cooling-off period, so once you’ve signed, you’re held to it.

That’s exactly why the pressure to “get it signed today, this offer’s only good now” exists. The urgency isn’t about a deadline. It’s about getting your signature down before you’ve had time to read, compare, or sleep on it — because the moment you sign, the protections you imagined you had largely aren’t there. Following the BBC’s 2025 investigation, the Federation of Small Businesses was reported to be calling for a change in the law on precisely this point.

Before you sign any business telecoms contract

1. Get every verbal promise in writing.If the price is fixed, the contract must say so. If it doesn’t, the promise doesn’t exist.
2. Find the price-rise clause.From January 2025, any in-contract rise must be stated upfront in pounds and pence. If you can’t find it, ask for it in writing before signing.
3. Check whether it’s a lease.“Free” handsets are often a separate, long equipment-finance agreement. Ask: is there a finance company involved, and what’s the total payable over the term?
4. Find the exit terms.Minimum term, notice period, early-termination charge. If leaving is expensive, that’s the whole point of the deal — for them.
5. Never sign on the spot. A genuine offer survives you reading it overnight. Pressure to sign now is the tell.

The contract that fits on a postcard

We took the opposite approach on purpose. There’s no long-term contract and no minimum term — Membershipis a flat £149/month, month to month, cancel whenever you like. No separate equipment-finance agreement. No bundled lock-in. No exit fee, and we port your numbers out for free if you go. And no small print engineered to say something different from what we told you — what we say is what you sign.

Even the call rates are out in the open: we pass through the wholesale rate BT charges (a regulated rate agreed by Ofcom, about 0.31p a minute to a UK landline and 0.64p to a UK mobile), published in full on our call-rates pageso you can check it. The whole point is that there’s nothing to hide, because there’s no margin buried anywhere to hide.