I have now received this reply from Ric Francis, Operations Director at the Post Office.
He blames my not being able to call many dialthrough numbers for companies like Callax (Abroadtel etc) & Finarea (Dialaround, BestMinutes etc) not forming access agreements with Cable & Wireless but I feel perfectly sure that Cable & Wireless have no incentive to form the access agreement because these cheaper call services lose them money. Whereas BT having Significant Market Power will have a regulatory obligation to form access agreements with any company that wants to connect with their customers.
What is most disgraceful is that Post Office/Cable & Wireless merely play an unobtainable tone when you dial one of these perfectly valid numbers when they could at least play a message saying they do not have an interconnect agreement with this telecoms company. At the moment you can get round this problem by dialling the 1280 override code to route the call with BT although I will be interested to see at what rate they are charged on my Post Office HomePhone bill given that the PostOffice does not quote a rate for these numbers in its call price guide but BT have no bill to charge them to me on. Thus clearly BT will pass these calls back to the PostOffice for billing. And for how much longer will we have accces to 1280 with Post Office HomePhone.
Seems to me that Wholesale Line Rental is only Fit For Purpose for the needs of telecoms operators but not of telecoms consumers since it does not offer a service that is equivalent to the one supplied by BT.
-----Original Message-----
From: ric.francis@postoffice.co.uk [mailto:ric.francis@postoffice.co.uk]
Sent: 03 May 2006 09:47
Subject: RE: Some 0871 Numbers Barred by Cable & Wireless on Post Office
HomePhone
Thank you for contacting me regarding the recent experience that you had
with Post Office HomePhone. Firstly, please accept my apologies for the
delay in responding, but as I am sure you are aware, the question that you
asked was a technical one and one that we had not come across before, so I
was keen to ensure that the team (and our partners) reviewed the background
to your question thoroughly.
Having now looked in to the details, we believe that the problem you
encountered is a general issue within the industry - and not specific to
Post Office HomePhone.
I say that because I can assure you that there is no policy within either
the Post Office or our carrier, Cable and Wireless, to explicitly bar or
restrict access to certain number ranges for commercial reasons. The only
exception to this would be for the purposes of fraud protection agreed at
an industry level, and these would generally also be restricted by other
carriers such as BT... but this is not relevant to this case in point.
We believe that the issues that you are experiencing are due to the
carriers that own the number ranges that you are trying to call, failing to
make arrangements with carriers other than BT (i.e. Cable & Wireless in our
case) to carry calls to those number ranges.
As you may be aware, the current industry process is for the carrier that
owns the range to contact, and agree, the routing and commercial details
with other carriers. For example, for the range '0871 858', Cable &
Wireless has not received a numbering notification from the carrier
responsible for the number range (Callfax) and in this case, the only other
carrier that we are aware of that Callfax has an agreement with is BT -
hence your ability to route calls over the BT network. Cable & Wireless's
numbering team have confirmed that as of now, they still have not been
contacted by Callfax regarding this number range. They are however checking
their records further to ascertain if there has been any other
correspondence with Callfax relating to this matter.
Cable & Wireless are now also looking into the other number ranges in your
e-mail dated 29th April and we will respond to you further once we
understand the issue with these number ranges.
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