Ofcom's campaign against termination rates continues

Re: Noooo!

"Oi OFCOM! You useless knobs! How about customer-set termination rates, so that I can establish how much it costs to call me, according to the dialling number? "

I solved that years ago.

Friends and family get given my number, everyone else gets a £1.50/min 070 number (remember those?)

I don't make any money out of it, but I do get a smug satisfaction when I get a cold call coming in via the 070 and an incentive to make the call last as long as possible.

Re: Race to the bottom

Getting rid of a speed bump isn't a race to the bottom. it's a race to a marginally more competitive market. I'm a huge fan of charging as much as absolutely possible for everything, but that doesn't apply to utilities. Communications companies are utilities, no matter how much they'd like you to believe otherwise.

Termination fees have always been a sideways effort to screw taxpayers. A government makes a big show out of auctioning spectrum, then provides (one of many) ways for the licensees to recoup that investment without actually competing for customers, which is a huge part of the justification for the auctions in the first place: Making a significant investment in spectrum will force competition between licensees.

It's paying lip service to competititive markets, but undermining the entire premise by reducing the need for competititive strategies amonst licensees. Which is why they've never spent more on infrastructure than they absolutely had to in order to meet the terms of thier licenses, don't buy into the bullshit that they would improve on that if they could. They've got much less reason to be competititive when they can generate revenue from doing nothing more than what they agreed to do in order to participate in spectrum auctions.

Lastly, there's more wireless (and broadband) infrastructure in the greate Washington D.C. area than in all of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland combined (really). There's simply zero justification for all the bullshit you guys deal with to be able to communicate with each other. You're getting just absolutely fucked by the service providers and your government and it all, 100% of it, just flies in the face of capitalism, competititive markets and even reason. The coverage area is tiny, there's no rough terrain to speak of and the entire area is already so covered up with incredibly overbuilt primary infrastructure that it's a joke that there should be even a whimper to expand coverage for any communications there.

If you want better service you're wasting your time hoping the incredibly lazy bastards who run communications services there and your anti-business government are going to do anything towards those ends. One of the best things that could possibly happen to that entire little section of the world would be for the communications companies to collapse, or just vanish. Somebody else could replace it all in less than a year if they wanted to. None of it represents large, or complex infrastructure.

Re: Solving telemarketers

We need two further steps. 1, prohibit use of CLID-suppression by non-residential lines (or better, have a per-use charge for it: probably 10p or so would be enough to stop abuse by telemarketers without impacting home users). 2. Enforce the existing requirement for networks to allow subscribers to block anonymous calls, and require it to be a non-charged option (better still, make it a free yes/no choice on new lines: "Would you like to accept anonymous incoming calls (Y/N)?" Enough people say 'no' to that, end of telemarketers.

I'd like to see a short code, like the 7726 you can forward SMS spam to: dial 17726 after a spam call and the caller gets flagged as a spammer by the telco, using the network-level identity (whether they block/hide/fake CLID or not). Anyone reported too often gets investigated and slapped with 6+ figure fines - or in the case of foreign operators, blocked from calling the UK.

Re: Solving telemarketers

You forget that this is a global industry. Ofcom can't mandate what happens outside the UK, and even concerted EU efforts won't stop bad practice elsewhere in the world.

Under your proposal, pretty much all international calls arriving in the UK would have their CLI flagged as 'untrusted'*. That's not going to help people who receive genuine calls from abroad alongside spam, because you can't set a blanket rule that deals with both scenarios properly.

* Most international calls don't get carried by former PTTs these days. International minutes are traded anonymously on the telco equivalent of eBay. A call might have passed through mutliple networks before it arrived in the UK and the terminating telco will have zero relationship with the originating telco, they won't even know who it is. A UK telco will only know who is handing the call to them, not where it came from. It would be like making your postman liable for the contents of letters he delivers to you.

Re: Solving telemarketers

All that blocking calls with no CLI will do, is expand the use of fake CLIs (That's calls which have a CLI that is not a valid dialable number) These usually originate from overseas. OFCOM need to add a rule which says that calls with UK CLI must originate in the UK.

That way, for most people, you block/ignore anonymous & international calls. I know this isn't perfect, but no anti-spam system is perfect.

Since anonymous call blocking became a bit more mainstream, I've seen more UK companies transmit some sort of number; Usually a non-geographic number. (The only except being the local police: They insist on sending no CLI. Grrrr....)