Out of area charges when moving from BT

LG83_2

I have just been searching and ringing around for a good deal on my broadband and phone and felt I'd really struck gold. That was until I rang up and found out that because of my geographical location, the new company (EE in this case) had to charge me £10 extra a month to cover what BT were charging them. Apparently not all boxes are released by BT for general consumption by all other suppliers. Since BT own the rights, they pass a charge on to the new supplier and customer. I was disgusted.

Seemingly Ofcom are aware of it, but we need the big help of Martin to raise the profile of this type of scandal and accelerate the change to stop BT monopolising and unfairly discriminating against certain areas.

I did think also that there is potentially an issue with the advertising of the deals because I was sucked in only to find it was well far away from the deal I was expecting.

Martin......work your magic!

macman

It's nothing to do with BT 'discriminating.' Alternative providers are free to provide an LLU service from any exchange they wish (BT cannot and do not deny them such access), but the fixed capital cost of doing so is high, and makes no economic sense on many of the smaller rural exchanges where they would at most pick up a few hundred subscribers. The investment of LLU would never be recouped. So many of the 6,500 UK exchanges will remain non-LLU, BT only. You still have the option of using one of dozens of BT resellers on such exchanges, rather than BT itself, but their changes are naturally higher, as they have to pay BT Wholesale rates to use the BT network.

notbritishgas

The reason you would be charged more is that EE (Orange?) have not bothered to put their equipment into your exchange, it is not because BT has stopped them.
Consequently they would have to use BT's equipment and not surprisingly BT would make a charge.