Dormant Contracts, Live Revenue: What Five European Regulators Are Telling Telecom Operators

September 21, 2026 | 4 min Read

Dormant Contracts, Live Revenue: What Five European Regulators Are Telling Telecom Operators

In our earlier article on tariff transparency the Belgian Regulator BIPT turned annual best-tariff recommendations into an operational obligation. Since then, four more regulators have moved on the same problem: France’s ARCEP, the Netherlands’ ACM, the UK’s Ofcom, and Greece’s EETT.

All five point to the same finding. A large share of customers sit on tariffs that no longer match their usage or the market. Nobody fixes this proactively except the regulator.

The numbers, market by market

The Netherlands’ ACM measured it directly: 79% of fixed internet contracts and 60% of mobile contracts have passed their initial commitment period. These “dormant” customers overpay by up to €250 a year.

The UK’s Ofcom calls this the “loyalty penalty.” Combined across mobile, broadband and adjacent services, it can reach four figures a year per household. Ofcom has already moved to enforcement: mandatory end-of-contract notices, annual best-tariff alerts, and a ban on inflation-linked price rises mid-contract.

France’s ARCEP found a related but different symptom. 89.4% of active mobile plans now carry no commitment period. Switching has never been easier. Yet portability fell almost 25% in a year.

Belgium’s IBPT ran a companion study to its transparency obligation and put a euro figure on the same status quo bias at plan level.

Greece fits the same pattern. EETT launched EETT 360°, a platform built to help consumers compare telecom and postal tariffs — the same instinct behind IBPT’s comparator and ARCEP’s “Mon réseau mobile.” The market itself is moving too. Prepaid subscriptions and postpaid contracts reached near-parity by the end of 2024, up from a 4.2M-to-11.2M split a decade earlier. The country’s largest operator posted its strongest quarterly net contract additions in 17 years. When that much of a base shifts between plan types, a large number of customers are re-evaluating what they pay for what they use.

Five countries, five approaches. Belgium, the Netherlands and Greece favour guidance and consumer tools. The UK enforces. France is sounding the alarm without a mandate yet. The underlying fact stays the same everywhere: the gap between what customers pay and what they should pay is now large enough, and visible enough, that regulators treat it as a market problem worth measuring in public.

Why this is operational, not just compliance

It’s tempting to read these five findings as more paperwork. That misses the point. Each regulator publishes a map of latent churn risk — a target list of customers one comparison click away from leaving. Each one also signals that operators who don’t manage that population proactively will eventually be told to.

The operational requirement is the same everywhere. An operator needs to consolidate real usage data at the individual customer level. It needs to model that usage against its full tariff portfolio. It needs to identify, defensibly and at scale, which customers sit on the wrong plan. Only the trigger changes: an annual notice in Belgium, a voluntary push in the Netherlands, a comparison platform in Greece, a binding rule in the UK. The underlying data problem stays identical.

Where SurPrice fits

This is the exact use case SurPrice was built for. It recalculates tariffs from raw CDR-level usage, not from aggregated or behavioural proxies. For any customer, against any tariff in the portfolio, it shows whether a better-fitting plan exists, and by how much. The calculation doesn’t change whether the trigger is a Belgian annual obligation, a Dutch renewal guideline, a UK-style mandatory notice, or an operator’s own decision to move first.

Operators were already running SurPrice for this before any of these obligations existed. Not for compliance — for retention and upsell. They used it to find over- or under-provisioned customers and migrate them to a better plan before a competitor’s ad did it first. The five regulatory pictures above confirm the scale of that population, market by market. Greece’s own prepaid-to-postpaid shift shows the same scale applies at home as it does in Brussels, The Hague or London.

Conclusion

What used to be an internal retention hypothesis is now a published statistic — or a visible market trend — in five major European markets. Operators that treat their dormant or mismatched customer base as a revenue-retention opportunity, rather than a compliance deadline, are working from the same data the regulators are. They’re just acting on it earlier.

If you want to discuss how SurPrice’s usage-based tariff modelling can flag at-risk or mismatched customers in your own portfolio, get in touch with the Neurocom team.