LONDON: The UK Office of Communication (Ofcom) has notified the procedure on how the wholesale markets that underpin landline and mobile telephone calls in the UK, will be regulated, for the period between April 2021 and March 2026.
Call termination:
When people call a UK mobile or landline number, the caller’s network provider pays a wholesale charge to the recipient’s phone company for connecting the call. This is called a ‘termination rate’.
To continue to protect customers from high prices, Ofcom is capping termination rates for calls made and received in the UK, based on the cost of connecting a call. This includes:
· For calls to mobiles, the cap will be 0.379p per minute next year, which is lower than the current cap of 0.468p per minute. We will also continue applying this mobile termination cap to calls to ‘070’ numbers.
· For calls to landlines, we will maintain the current cap of 0.0292p per minute in real terms.
· When someone calls a UK number from abroad, we propose that UK providers should charge no more than the rate they are charged when their customers make calls to that international destination.
Call origination and interconnection:
Currently, some phone companies still use BT’s wholesale ‘call origination’ service to enable their customers to make calls on their landline. Over the next few years, landline calls will be increasingly carried over more modern, Internet Protocol (IP) networks. So Ofcom will deregulate wholesale call origination, as providers will no longer need to purchase it from BT.
As industry moves away from using the traditional telephone network, Ofcom expect companies will increasingly interconnect with each other using the more modern IP interconnection networks. So Ofcom has set out the procedure to regulate BT’s IP interconnection service.
Telephone calls are an essential service for many people. In 2019, 200 billion minutes of calls were made by customers using a landline or a mobile service. People’s continued reliance on mobile calls in particular came to the fore at the start of the spring lockdown announced in March 2020, with a 10%-45% increase of mobile voice traffic across operators, compared with the period before the lockdown.
Competition in these markets results in greater choice, innovation, better quality and lower prices for customers. To ensure competition is effective, Ofcom regulates a number of wholesale markets that support our ability to call each other.
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