Ofcom’s quarterly report of complaints against major UK telecoms and pay TV providers shows an overall drop between April and June 2013, mainly due to a fall in the number of landline and broadband complaints. It’s the regulator’s tenth quarterly report.

T-Mobile generated the most complaints of all major ‘pay monthly’ mobile service providers, with an average of 0.17 complaints per 1,000 customers. It had also been in the same position for the previous quarter, although complaint numbers have fallen. Its EE stablemate Orange remained the next most complained about network (0.13 per 1,000 customers) followed by Three (0.09 per 1,000 customers). All were above the industry average.

Complaints about Vodafone and Virgin Mobile were lower than the industry average, although O2 retained its position as the network service provider generating the lowest proportion of complaints (0.03 per 1,000 customers).

As with previous months, ‘pay as you go’ complaint numbers were too low to provide useful data. Ofcom didn’t receive more than 30 complaints per month about any pay as you go network.

TalkTalk generated the most complaints about landline telephone service, despite its figures falling to their lowest level since Ofcom first began publishing complaint data. The EE group (including Orange) had the highest proportion of fixed-line broadband complaints, while BT Vision had the highest proportion of ‘pay TV’ complaints.

Claudio Pollack, Director of Ofcom’s Consumer Group, said “It’s encouraging to see the biggest reduction in complaints for a year and we hope these figures will incentivise providers to further improve their performance. We’re committed to giving consumers valuable information to help them choose a provider that best suits their needs. Consumer complaints also help us to identify where enforcement action is needed and ensure that providers comply with our rules.”

[Ofcom report]

Pay Monthly mobile complaints per 1,000 customers, April 2011 to June 2013 [Ofcom]