Status

Base sold on

Wholesale network

TalkTalk wholesale (via Shell Energy)

What happened to it

The Post Office agreed in February 2021 to sell its entire home phone and broadband business — around 465,000 customers — to Shell Energy, completing in March 2021. Those customers followed Shell Energy to TalkTalk in 2024, so a Post Office broadband line is now a TalkTalk line two owners on.

Post Office Broadband: Discontinued in 2021, and What Replaced It

The Post Office does not sell broadband and has not done since 2021. If you are looking for a deal, there is nothing to compare. If you have an account that started as Post Office broadband, it is now a TalkTalk account, and it has probably been out of contract for years.

What the Post Office actually sold, and to whom

In February 2021 the Post Office agreed to sell its entire home phone and broadband business to Shell Energy. The deal covered roughly 465,000 customers and completed the following month, at a reported value somewhere between £80m and £100m. It was a clean exit rather than a partnership: the Post Office kept no stake in the service and stopped selling it.

Shell Energy then left the market itself. Octopus Energy acquired Shell Energy Retail in December 2023 and sold the broadband arm to TalkTalk, which has now migrated every account. So the customer base has changed hands twice since leaving the Post Office, and the brand on the bill has changed three times in total.

None of those moves required the customer to do anything, which is precisely the problem. A contract nobody actively renewed is a contract nobody reviewed, and the pricing follows.

Why a Post Office broadband account is probably expensive now

Broadband pricing in the UK works on a step: an introductory rate for the minimum term, then the standard rate automatically. The step is substantial and it happens without notice beyond what the original contract said. An account that has not been renegotiated since the Post Office era has been sitting above that step for several years.

The corollary is the good news. Out of contract means no early termination charge, so you can leave whenever you like. It is the strongest negotiating position a broadband customer ever holds, and it is worth using rather than tolerating.

Check the bill for two things: the monthly amount, and any line rental billed separately. Older packages of this generation frequently split broadband and phone, and the phone half is often paying for a landline nobody in the household has used in years.

The copper switch-off makes this urgent rather than optional

Traditional copper phone lines are being retired across the UK, exchange by exchange rather than on one national date. Anything sold as a home phone plus broadband package of the Post Office generation sits on that copper infrastructure, so the migration is coming whether or not you choose it.

What that means in practice is a move to a digital voice service, where the phone plugs into the router rather than the wall socket. It works, with two caveats worth knowing in advance: it does not work in a power cut without a battery backup, and any device on the line that is not a phone, a care alarm, a lift line, an alarm panel, needs checking separately.

A household with a vulnerable person relying on a care alarm should raise that with the provider before the migration rather than after. Providers have obligations here and there are arrangements available, but they are applied on request.

What to do with the account

Treat it as a switch rather than a renewal. Under the One Touch process the provider you move to handles everything, including closing the old account, so there is no retention call and no gap to manage on the Openreach network. If the address has full fibre available, that is the comparison worth running: the upload speed changes, which is the part households actually notice on video calls.

If you would rather stay put, ring and ask what an in-contract price looks like. Retention pricing is not published and is not the same as the new-customer rate, so ask for both and compare them against what other providers are offering. The parallel story is on the Shell Energy page.

Why a post office was selling broadband at all

It looks eccentric now and it was ordinary at the time. Through the 2010s a run of consumer brands with no telecoms operation sold broadband as a white-label service: the Post Office, John Lewis, a supermarket or two, an energy company. The brand supplied trust and a customer list; somebody else supplied the network, the provisioning and the support.

The economics worked while acquisition was cheap and churn was low. They stopped working when full fibre arrived, because a reseller on a copper wholesale product cannot follow customers onto a network it does not buy, and cannot compete on the speeds that started to matter. One by one the retail brands sold their bases to the companies that actually owned the plumbing.

That is the useful lesson for anyone comparing broadband today, and it is why this site's provider pages lead on who owns the network rather than on the logo. A brand can leave the market in a single announcement. The line into your house cannot, and whoever operates it is who you are really buying from.

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