ISP BT Charges UK Customers for Keeping Router and TV Box

The days of keeping your broadband router at the end of a contract are over, at least for some. BT has joined a few other ISPs in changing their terms so that customers will now be charged a fee if they wish to keep their router – or YouView TV box – at the end of a contract (unless you stay with the provider or return it).

The idea of supplied broadband routers being effectively on lease is nothing new and some other providers, such as Virgin Media, already do it. In BT’s case the operator will charge up to £50 for their broadband routers and up to £115 for their YouView TV set-top-boxes, although you can of course simply return them when switching away and avoid the fee entirely.

For its part BT will refurbish and then redistribute the returned units back to consumers, which is something they’ve been doing for awhile. Otherwise customers that choose not to stay with BT at the end of their contract can expect to be sent a padded envelope in order to help return the unit.

“This will help to limit the amount of waste going into landfill, and allows us to refurbish more equipment and move towards a more sustainable model,” said BT (BBC). Sadly BT’s routers are also locked down and highly customised for use on their own network, which makes using them with other ISPs difficult (i.e. less reason to keep them).

Meanwhile some consumers may view the simple hassle of having to send their router back as a way of further discouraging switching to a different provider. Apparently BT changed their terms to support all of this in December 2019, although at the time we were too busy reporting on other events to notice (pre-Christmas is always busy).