Why does my broadband keep dropping out — and what are you actually owed?

“Broadband keeps dropping” is one of the most common complaints on every UK provider’s own forum, and one of the least well served by the people who write about broadband. Providers explain the symptom perfectly well — TalkTalk has a seven-step article on it, Openreach has a page headed “My service has stopped working or is intermittent” — but almost nobody explains what you are and are not entitled to when it happens.

It is also a genuinely different problem, in a way that turns out to matter more than it sounds — because the rules that protect you when your broadband stops working do not protect you when it merely keeps stopping.

Dropping out is not the same as being down

Virgin Media puts the distinction well on its own site: unlike a full outage, where there is no connection at all and nothing can go online, an intermittent signal does not stop working completely — instead the connection fluctuates, coming and going or slowing down unpredictably.

That distinction is not cosmetic. It decides which remedies exist.

	Total loss of service	Intermittent drops
What it means	You cannot access the public internet at all	Connection comes and goes, then returns by itself
Automatic compensation	£10.34 for each calendar day it stays unfixed, once it is still broken two full working days after you report it (rate as at August 2026; the amounts rise each April with CPI)	Excluded — the Code says a provider is not required to pay
Right to exit under the speeds code	No — that code is about download speed only	No
What you do have	Report it; the clock starts from the report	Report it, log it, complain, escalate to the ombudsman
Who has to prove which one it was	—	Your provider, if it disputes what kind of loss you had

The rule almost nobody knows

Ofcom’s consumer page describes the compensation trigger as your service having “stopped working”. It never uses the word intermittent. The exclusion is real, though — it just lives one document down, in footnote 1 on page 5 of the ten-page industry Code of Practice that the scheme runs on:

A communications provider is not required to pay compensation where a customer experiences an intermittent loss of service.

And the definition underneath it is equally exact. For the purposes of the Code, “Total Loss of Service” means, for broadband, “where the customer is unable to access the public internet” — as a result of an unplanned change in the operation of the network.

So a line that drops out fifteen times a day, and works perfectly in between, is outside the scheme. That is a hard thing to read when you have lost a work call for the third time this week, and it is better to know it now than to discover it after six weeks of waiting for a credit that was never coming.

The providers are not hiding it either — they just do not put it anywhere near the search results. BT’s own automatic compensation page lists, among the reasons you will not be paid, that “the fault is intermittent, when your service cuts in and out”, and EE publishes the identical wording. Both are BT Group brands running the same page, so treat that as one publisher rather than two — but it does mean the exclusion appears in a provider’s own consumer copy, not only in a footnote a customer will never open.

But the burden of proof is on them

The same footnote does not stop there, and the second sentence is the useful one:

However, where there is a dispute between a customer and a communications provider as to the type of loss of service suffered by the customer, it is for the communications provider to provide evidence to the customer.

If your line has genuinely been dead — not flaky, dead — and your provider is recording it as intermittent to avoid paying, that is a dispute about the type of loss, and the provider has to produce the evidence, not you. Say so, in writing, in those terms.

This is also why the log matters. A record showing your connection was down from 09:14 to 17:40 on a Tuesday is not an intermittent fault, and it is very hard to argue with.

Is it your Wi-Fi, or is it your line?

Do this before anything else, because it decides which half of the problem you are actually solving. TalkTalk publishes the test more plainly than anyone:

Plug your device into the router using an Ethernet cable. If it works fine → it’s your Wi-Fi setup. If it still drops → it may be a line or router issue.

Use the wired connection for a day, not for five minutes. Intermittent means intermittent; a ten-second test proves nothing either way.

If it turns out to be Wi-Fi, you are in much better territory — Wi-Fi problems are usually fixable from your side of the router, and our fix slow Wi-Fi diagnostic and better Wi-Fi in every room cover the ground. If it still drops over a cable, keep reading.

Stop restarting the router

The instinct when a connection drops is to power-cycle the router, and if it drops often the instinct is to do it often. On a copper or part-copper line that actively makes things worse.

TalkTalk’s guidance is direct: restart once in twenty-four hours, off for thirty seconds, and “restarting too often can slow your connection down”.

Why is less clearly published than the internet believes. BT describes something adjacent for a newly activated line — during the settling-in period the exchange is “automatically trying different speeds to find the fastest stable speed your particular line can support” — but BT does not say the same mechanism runs on a mature line, and we could not find a provider or Openreach page that does. What is first-party is that the network wants a continuous view: TalkTalk asks customers to keep the router switched on at all times so it can “gather important data about your line”, and says restarting too often can cost you speed. What exactly a reboot costs you, no provider publishes.

So: one restart, thirty seconds, then leave it alone and gather evidence instead. Our restart your router properly page covers doing that one restart correctly.

If the line is new, or has just been repaired

There is a settling period, and it explains a large share of “my brand new fibre keeps dropping” posts.

BT states it plainly: it is normal to have variations in speed and intermittent connection during the first few days, it does not mean anything is wrong, and the process “can take up to ten days”. Openreach says something narrower about the period after work is done — that broadband speeds sometimes take a little time to stabilise after a repair or an upgrade, and your provider can confirm what is normal. Note that Openreach is talking about speed, not about dropouts.

Ten days, router left switched on, no reporting. If it is still dropping on day eleven, that is when you have something worth reporting.

One honest limit: every first-party source we could read describes this stabilisation only for the first days after activation, repair or upgrade. None of them describes it running on a line that has been up for years. Forum lore about lines being permanently “banded” down after a bad week is widespread, and we could not find a provider or Openreach page that documents it — so this page does not tell you that story.

Who do you actually report it to?

Your own provider. Not the network operator, however many people on a forum tell you otherwise. Openreach is explicit:

We provide the network for many different providers, but we don’t manage customer accounts. Only your provider has access to your service details and can raise a repair with us.

That holds even when the engineer who eventually arrives is an Openreach one, and even when the fault is obviously in the street. Ofcom makes the same point from the other side: your provider is responsible for fixing faults, even if another company like Openreach owns the network.

Openreach’s own expectation for repair, kept hedged as it publishes it: many faults are fixed within one to two working days, and more complex problems such as underground cable damage can take longer.

What to do, in order

1. Rule out the settling-in period. Activated, repaired or upgraded in the last ten days? Wait it out with the router on.
2. Restart once, thirty seconds, then stop. No more than once in twenty-four hours.
3. Plug straight into the router with a cable and use it for a day. Steady over cable means a Wi-Fi problem; still dropping means the line or the router.
4. Check the physical layer — cable firmly in the right socket and undamaged, and reverse anything you changed just before the drops started. If your router plugs into a phone socket, Ofcom’s advice is to use the main socket rather than an extension; on full fibre, check the cable into the ONT.
5. Start a dated log. Date, start time, rough duration, Wi-Fi or cable, and what the router lights were doing.
6. Report it to your provider, and use the word intermittent. Tell them when it started, that it is intermittent rather than constant, and what you have already tried.
7. Say if anyone in the household is vulnerable or relies on the connection for telecare, healthcare devices or alarms — you might qualify for priority fault repair, and your provider can register you for it.
8. Ask about charges before accepting an engineer or new equipment, because the answer differs by provider and by whose side the fault turns out to be on.
9. Escalate on paper, not by phone, if the fault keeps being closed and reopened.

Reading the lights while it happens

The most useful thirty seconds you can spend on an intermittent fault is looking at the router at the moment it drops. A hub that goes orange or red and comes back is telling you the broadband connection itself dropped. A hub that stays solidly connected throughout, while your laptop loses the internet, is telling you the problem is between the router and the device — which is a Wi-Fi problem wearing a broadband problem’s clothes.

Our router lights guide explains what each state means, and there are per-provider pages behind it for BT, Sky, Virgin Media and the rest. Add the light state to your log — it is the single detail that most reliably tells a support agent which team should own the fault.

If they keep saying it is fixed

This is the characteristic ending of an intermittent fault, and it is worth handling deliberately rather than by ringing again.

Raise a formal complaint, not another support call — that is a different process with a different clock. Ofcom’s summary of the route is: follow your provider’s formal complaints procedure, and if it is still unresolved after six weeks, or your provider has sent you a deadlock letter, you can take it to a free, independent dispute resolution scheme.

Because a provider is not required to pay automatic compensation for an intermittent fault, that is the route that actually carries weight here. Two things make it work:

• The log. Dated, boring, specific. It is what an adjudicator reads.
• Going to the right scheme. There are two, and sending a case to the wrong one wastes weeks — which ombudsman handles your provider has the mapping.

You can also ask your provider directly for a goodwill credit for the period the service was not what you paid for. Nothing obliges them to give it, but nothing stops you asking, and a well-kept log makes the ask concrete rather than rhetorical.

Related

• Is my broadband down? — for when it is not coming back on its own.
• Speed test is fine but the internet is slow — the other problem that a speed test cannot see.
• Not getting the speed you pay for — the right to exit, and why dropouts do not trigger it.

→ Use the fix slow internet diagnostic