Shell Energy Broadband: History, Prices & What Happened (2019–2024)

Shell Energy Broadband was a UK home internet service that existed for around five years, from March 2019 until its customers were transferred to TalkTalk in 2024. The broadband business had a longer history under different names: it began as part of First Utility, a Warwick-based energy challenger, which added broadband around 2016 to bundle internet with gas and electricity. When Shell acquired First Utility in February 2018, the broadband service came with the deal. Shell rebranded the whole business as Shell Energy in March 2019. It then took on Post Office Broadband’s entire customer base in 2021. Shell ultimately decided to exit both its UK energy and telecoms businesses, selling the whole operation to Octopus Energy in December 2023, from where the broadband customers moved to TalkTalk.

First Utility and the origins of the service

First Utility was founded in 2008 by Mark Daeche, Darren Braham and Marcus Citron as a spin-out from First Telecom, a telephone services company. It launched as an energy challenger to the six dominant suppliers, offering competitive gas and electricity tariffs. In 2016 it added a broadband service, bundling home internet with energy on a single bill, positioning itself as a one-stop utility provider. The broadband ran over the Openreach network (BT’s infrastructure division, which owns and maintains the copper and fibre physical connections to most UK homes and operates the telephone exchanges used by most non-cable broadband providers).

First Utility’s broadband offer was not without problems. In 2014 and 2015 the company was unable to keep pace with the volume of new customers signing up and received a high number of complaints about delays, unresolved faults and customer service failures. The company acknowledged the problems publicly and worked to address them, though its Ofgem (the energy regulator) record also included a disciplinary order in 2010 for failing to protect vulnerable customers.

Shell Energy Broadband packages and pricing

Under the Shell Energy name, the broadband product was straightforward. Three tiers were available: Fast Broadband (ADSL, the older telephone-line technology, with average speeds around 11Mbps), Superfast Fibre (FTTC; fibre to the street cabinet, with average speeds around 38Mbps) and Superfast Fibre Plus (FTTC at around 63 to 67Mbps). All packages ran on the Openreach network and were comparable in speed and technology to what BT, Sky and TalkTalk offered over the same infrastructure. Shell later added ultrafast packages with higher speeds.

The service operated on 18-month fixed contracts. Pricing was competitive; Shell positioned itself as cheaper than the major providers while offering a discount to customers who also took their energy from Shell. The router supplied was a dual-band device with 2.4GHz and 5GHz wireless frequencies. Shell Energy Broadband received notably poor Ofcom (the communications regulator) complaints ratings after the Post Office acquisition in 2021 significantly increased its customer base: complaints peaked at 31 per 100,000 customers in the second quarter of 2022, well above the industry average. The company acknowledged the issue publicly and said it was reviewing cases to identify improvements needed.

The Post Office acquisition and growth

In February 2021, Shell Energy agreed to buy the Post Office’s entire home phone and broadband business, which supplied approximately 465,000 customers and had operated since 2007. The deal was completed in March 2021 at an estimated value of £80 million to £100 million. Shell and the Post Office both operated on Openreach infrastructure, making the technical migration relatively straightforward. The acquisition took Shell’s total broadband customer base from around 130,000 to close to 600,000 at a stroke, crossing the threshold at which Ofcom published individual ISP complaints data. The doubling in scale created the service delivery strains that contributed to the complaints spike.

Shell’s exit and the customer chain

In June 2023, following a five-month review of its retail operations, Shell announced it would sell its UK domestic energy and broadband businesses. Octopus Energy won the bid, completing its acquisition of Shell Energy Retail in December 2023. Octopus had no interest in running a broadband business; its focus was the energy customers. The broadband base of approximately 480,000 to 500,000 customers was sold to TalkTalk, which was already providing the wholesale network behind Shell’s service. TalkTalk confirmed the acquisition in early 2024 and began migrating customers across. For those customers, it was the third change of company name in three years: from Shell to Octopus to TalkTalk.

In summary

Shell Energy Broadband was the broadband arm of an energy company that was itself bought and sold twice in six years. The service was broadly functional and competitively priced but never distinguished itself technically, and its complaints record after the Post Office acquisition was among the worst in the sector for a period. Shell’s exit from the UK retail market was a corporate decision unrelated to broadband specifically; it formed part of a withdrawal from direct consumer retail across multiple countries. The customers it passed to TalkTalk were largely inherited rather than organically grown, and many of them had already passed through at least one previous transfer of ownership.