EIAs are £452.17/month (a statutory amount originally defined in The Online Safety Act’s 2027 update, subject to triple-lock inflation), licensed, and subject to inspection. There’s a four month waiting list for licensing due to backlogs at the local County Court.
The alternative is therefore to use up a strike and apply to have the account repurposed back to a Citizen User Account. CUAs must remain below a 50:1 down/up ratio and must have p90 non-https “control” traffic of 48kbps or less. They are expensive too but you get a 25% discount if you install your ISP’s mobileconfig / MDM profile though. With the profile discount the price is now only £64.99 a month.
(This assumes you run an Approved Platform capable of mobile device management. Anything else — Linux based, old versions of macOS, Windows <= 13 etc. — has to pay the full price and CUAs are limited to one Custom Access device per connection.)
You can get it down to £49.99 a month if you sign up for a 12-month trial of their home security system — cameras, door “e-locks”, that sort of thing. The devices are locked down but you can see the last 48h of events on their cloud portal. The devices have tamper detectors and the traffic is encrypted e2e but luckily that doesn’t count towards your CUA agreement’s limits on opaque traffic.
* does not apply to pensioners
..but sadly within the margin of ridiculousness for our government's approach to the internet.
If your society is anti freedom of information, your society deserves a spanking.
My primary complaint with the UK and EU right now is that they have been attempting to restrict US freedom of information, versus say China who doesn’t make an effort overseas. Not only are the UK and EU exerting pressure against US companies to change their global policies, but especially in the case of the UK, they are attempting to change the legal framework governing the internet by claiming that sites are somehow subject to UK law unless they proactively block the UK. All this on top of long time EU/UK participation in shady “counter-misinformation” efforts that have spun up a web of state-funded NGOs who attempt to influence US policy against freedom of information. So yeah, I’m pissed at your countries in particular.