The principal problem now Dave is of course that although the government saw when these state monopolies were passed into private ownership that there had to be some body to oversee each monopoly, with the power to control things thereafter, to prevent the now private monopoly from holding consumers to ransom as they would naturally do if they had unfettered freedom, almost all of these supposed controlling bodies have failed to deliver and have always made judgements in favour of the vested now private monopolies. This is true in the areas of Water supplies, Sewerage, Energy, railways and most of all Telcommunications.

In Telecommunications Oftel and now Ofcom have completely failed to deliver; they have failed to control pricing, failed to control all manner of scams, have failed to act in the consumers' interest at almost every juncture and have above all failed to execute their responsibilities under the Acts. The vigorous competition from those like 18866 and 1899 seems almost to have occurred despite the discouragement and resistance of Ofcom, rather than because of any efforts that they have made to encourage competition in telecommunications or to create a level playing field.

Although you know that it clearly could not be so, you could be forgiven for almost suspecting that they were being paid to act against the consumers' interest at every turn!

Hi Tony B,

Yes I have seen their site before. However, although it may be different if you are a paid member, although it is a comprehensive list of providers it does not actually seem ever to "compare" costs, and that I think could be a severe limitation. In other words if you actually wanted to determine the cheapest provider for a particular duration call to a particular location it would seem to involve trawling through all the lists - very time consuming and not egonomic.

The automated solution now provided by MoneysavingExpert is I think much better, although it may not include all of the providers listed in the Magsys database?