Say No to 090!

Network service providers ought to be obliged to provide PIN numbers to all of their customers for the purposes of lifting a preset bar on all 00 (International) and 09 (Premium rated) numbers, on a call by call basis, if the custmers so wishes. Customers should not have to pay for this. This would put an end to 'rogue dialling' more or less at a stroke.

Network service providers won't be keen to do this. I wonder why that would be?

Thanks for your response and I understand your points, though I don't necessarily agree with all of them.

BT offer a call barring service, chargeable at £1.75 per month. So your point that it would cost millions for BT to install kit does not hold since there is already the facility available via BT. I feel that customers should be provided, free of charge, with the facility to lift bars on a call by call basis should they so wish.

I understand fully the revenue sharing arrangments and that the service provider gets roughy half of the spoils. I believe that on the whole telcos don't really want to put a stop to this because as well as being extremely lucrative for the service provider, it is also lucrative for the telco.

I know very well that BT and other service providers cannot do as they wish. However, I feel certain that due to the amount of complaint that there is, that Ofcom will have to act and I believe that they ought to.

The National Numbering Scheme is a complex issue for those who have no concept of it and it is wrong that people are being absolutely conned into dialling telephone numbers (rogue dialling) that they have no idea they are dialling and they have no idea that they have dialled them until they are billed.

bunking_off wrote:

BT may well offer a (chargeable) facility to bar calls - I'm not sure if it offers a call by call over-ride by entering a PIN, but I'm sure someone will post one way or the other.

Regardless of that, I can categorically state that such a facility with PIN over-ride isn't available on my switches (which are of the same variety as BT's) without 6 figure investment. Applying call barring so that a customer has e.g. access to 090 barred without the ability to over-ride via PIN is far more do-able, but it involves manual configuration so we have to charge. It shouldn't, and an automated IT system would be better, so we're developing that : but we have to recover our costs somehow - go past BT and you'll find very few telcos in the UK that make any money (handkerchiefs out, please).

I understand your perception that the telcos clean up on this type of call, but the fact of the matter is that the retention by the originating provider is not particularly high (approx 0.5ppm daytime, less at other times)...no-one will get rich on that, and no-one will justify spending millions on the back of it either : hence barring becomes a chargeable item. The terminating provider does make more money, obviously - though it's a cut-throat market and I think your assessment that the service provider gets only half of the revenue is wildly inaccurate (it used to be like that years ago, but hasn't been for a v.long time).

I wouldn't argue for a moment with your assertion that it is wrong that people are conned into dialling numbers when they have no idea they're making the call. The problem is that ICSTISs scrutiny on this domestically has done a very good job, and the fraudsters have fled to use numbers which are less well regulated, e.g. south pacific islands.

BT do operate a free call barring service for the 09 stream.You can have additional barring for £1.75 per month which will enable you to bar other types of numbers, ie international is one type. What I'm saying is that BT should offer it free. If they can offer free barring to the 09 stream then why not to other streams?

I accept your comment that beside BT that there are very few UK telcos who are making any great profit, but many are still in business and so presumably it is worthwhile for them to be so. It is, like may other industries, both a difficult and dynamic market.

I know that over the last few years there has been relentless depression of both national and international call tariffs and that telcos have looked hard at how and where to recover their falling margins. However, this argument is not entirely wholesome. BT and other telcos have cleverly ceased on the opportunity to to add an additonal layer of tariffing for international calls. I am of course referring to the the fact that a call made to an internationally registered mobile phone usually costs many times more per minute than the fixed line equivalent. BT started the ball rolling with this one by selecting just eleven countries to tariff differently from the standard landline rate. Today almost every country has a separate tariff for calling a mobile registered in it. I know that BT will cite the terminating party in the foreign domain as the bad guy by saying that they charge it such and such an amount to terminate the call on their network. However, this type of accounting between countries and networks has existed since time immemorial. BT has obviously not secured such a good deal in terminating charges for mobiles. Or could it be that retaining these higher termination charges means that BT get a bigger slice of revenue per call? I mean, we shouldn't foget that BT will have to charge termination fees for inbound foreign calls from both landline and mobiles registered abroad. It must be the case that they can use this as a bargaining tool to obtain lower termination charges for calls made from UK to overseas. Or maybe they don't actually want to because actually what has been entered into is a rather cosy cartel arrangement. The same point can be applied to domestic type calls. The plethora of 087 numbers in use means that BT can generate a hefty share of a 10p per minute call rate which they have to terminate on a geographical number. Yet 18866.com can offer a consumer an untimed call to a UK 01 or 02 number for just 1p. Bear in mind that BT will more than likely have to deliver this call, yet 18866.com must be making money from this, mustn't they?

I don't have any problem with BT or any other telco making money. I can well remember the days when BT was joined with the Post Office and the pair of them regularly turned in losses which meant that as nationalised industries they were bailed out and kept running by the taxpayer. The current status of BT is far preferable to that. At least now they contribute to the exchequer coffers, rather than draw from it, and that helps keep taxation lower than it might be. Long may that continue.

Steve_xx
We're way off the original topic, but here goes...

I subscribe to 18866. However, to accuse anyone of over-charging because their tariffs are higher than 18866 is unfair. A lesson on the economics of 18866 : when you make a call to a geo number using 18866, BT charge 18866 to originate the call, and assuming the call is to a BT number one a charge is made to terminate the call as well. 18866 absorbs these costs into their call charges. Given that this inter-operator cost is typically between 0.3-0.7ppm (*) for EACH of origination & termination, I leave you to draw your own conclusions about the profitability of a service that charges 1p per CALL. Still, if 18866 wishes to act as a charity, I'm quite happy to give them my business.

(*) depends upon the specifics of the connectivity, time of day and so on

On international calls, operators used to offer blended rates...this applied on the accounting at the international side, and was passed through to retail rates. So, e.g. France Telecom would charge UK operators a certain amount to terminate calls in France, knowing that it would cost them less to send calls to fixed lines, and more to send calls to mobiles.

Three things happened to disrupt this:

1) Competition at the national level meant that operators such as France Telecom were no longer a monopoly, hence these costs differences turned from being internal accounting issues to real money, as on specific calls they'd either make a large profit (landline destination) or have to pay more money out to e.g. Bouyges Mobile than they were receiving. Overall, though, the blended rate they charged the likes of BT covered their costs.

2) More people got mobiles, meaning that if there was a blended rate, it would have to trend up (it is a weighted average of two rates, and the weighting changes so more calls are going to the expensive destination).

3) Competition at the international level meant that while France Telecom were offering to terminate all calls at, say, 10c/min, a new entrant would offer to terminate solely calls to landlines at 8c/min, and solely to mobiles at 20c/min. If they were sensible, BT would then send all their French landline traffic to the new entrant (8c < 10c), but leave their mobile traffic on France Telecom (10c < 20c). As FT would then very quickly be making a loss, they'd abandon the blended rate.

...therefore, as blended rates were no longer typical for international accounting, these arrangements were passed onto the retail tariffs. Before this happened, I can recall some "interesting" call routings - because overseas telcos typically offered a single retail tariff for calls to UK (regardless of mobile or landline destination), and mobile termination rates are high in the UK, it wasn't unusual for calls from UK landlines to UK mobiles to be looped via e.g. the USA to pick up the lower rate.

As to BT using their dominance in UK landlines to influence termination rates overseas, I don't think this reflects the market dynamics. Although BT may have the vast majority of UK lines, >70% of inbound traffic to the UK does not use BT international capacity, hence the far end carrier has no direct interaction with BT : they pass the traffic to a competing operator, who then terminates the call domestically - BT's involvement in this inbound traffic is commonly only from the local exchange to the customer.

Don't misconstrue this as me being any kind of advocate for BT's rates...anyone who makes any kind of volumes of international calls and uses BT is a mug. Which perhaps explains why BT's share of the international market has dwindled.

Steve_xx

Agree that the UK geo calls may be a loss leader for 18866. The issue I see, however, is that (a) items such as this website and Working Lunch result in many people (including myself!) ploughing into them to only use them for UK geo calls and (b) on the face of it, their pricing is so keen that I can't see [m]any of their tariffs being particularly profitable. There are some where they will be making money - e.g. there's plenty margin in their calls to UK mobiles - but it's difficult to see how these will be offsetting the losses on calls to geo numbers, especially as it tends to be "price savvy" callers who use them. Who knows, perhaps they do know something we don't...