Complaints to BTK fall 6.5 per cent but stay 38.4 per cent above a year ago

Türkiye's Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK) received 79,586 consumer complaints about telecommunications, internet, satellite TV and cable TV services in the second quarter of 2026, its quarterly market data report shows.

That was 6.5 per cent fewer than the 85,147 in the first quarter but 38.4 per cent more than the 57,501 a year earlier, by Corridor Signal's calculation from BTK's series. Internet service providers (ISPs) accounted for 41,046 complaints, or 51.6 per cent, the report says.

The complaints reached BTK through its online consumer complaint system. The second-quarter total is the first quarterly fall since the first quarter of 2025, in the series that BTK publishes.

Complaints by service and per subscriber

• Internet service providers: 41,046, up 80.8 per cent on the second quarter of 2025 and down 5.6 per cent on the first quarter of 2026.
• Mobile: 32,340, up 7.3 per cent on the year and down 6.6 per cent on the quarter.
• Fixed telephone: 2,826, up 10.2 per cent and down 14.2 per cent.
• Satellite platforms: 2,674, up 52.6 per cent and down 10.1 per cent.
• Cable TV: 700, up 111.5 per cent and down 7.3 per cent.

The year-on-year and quarterly changes are Corridor Signal's calculations from the figures in BTK's second-quarter and second-quarter 2025 reports.

BTK also reports complaints per million subscribers. In the second quarter the rate was 2,094 for ISPs, 679 for satellite platforms, 446 for cable TV, 372 for mobile and 348 for fixed telephone, the report says. Each was lower than in the first quarter, when the rates were 2,213, 748, 481, 403 and 398. A year earlier, in the second quarter of 2025, the ISP rate was 1,178 and the mobile rate was 313. BTK has calculated the mobile rate on real mobile users, excluding machine-to-machine lines, since the first quarter of 2026, so the mobile figures are not strictly comparable with earlier quarters.

What people complain about

In BTK's breakdown, connection and service quality was the largest ISP complaint, at 19,888, or 48.45 per cent of ISP complaints. Subscription transactions followed at 10,761, then billing at 2,928, relocation transactions at 1,698 and commitment, penalty and early termination charges at 1,449.

For mobile, billing led with 6,548 complaints, or 20.25 per cent of the mobile total, followed by coverage and service quality at 5,701, commitment and penalty charges at 3,416, subscription transactions at 2,566 and tariffs and campaigns at 2,374, BTK's breakdown shows. The first-quarter report's chart, which is low resolution, gives about 7,200 for billing, 4,800 for commitment and penalty charges and 4,300 for coverage and service quality. On those figures, billing complaints fell by about 9 per cent in the quarter and commitment charges by about 29 per cent, while coverage and service quality rose by about a third. The second quarter was the first in which 5G service was available, from 1 April, and BTK does not link the complaint figures to 5G.

The most-cited issue in the other services was billing for satellite platforms, at 25.17 per cent of their complaints, subscription transactions for fixed telephone, at 35.07 per cent, and connection and service quality for cable TV, at 35.86 per cent, the same report shows.

Steps that the reports do not explain

The series moved in steps. Mobile complaints rose from 19,087 in the first quarter of 2025 to 30,153 in the second, and ISP complaints rose from 22,700 to 38,005 in the third quarter, taking the total from 57,501 to 82,073. Since then the quarterly total has stayed between 79,586 and 85,147. The complaint sections of BTK's reports for those quarters list the numbers and topics but do not say what drove the increases, so they cannot be attributed to changes in operator conduct, in consumer awareness or in the way complaints are filed.