...

Clive Hillier ran through some of the initial market research findings:

NTS service provider information request
First 250 valid returns analysed
Indicates 40-50% of calls locked in (ie. no choice but to use the number)
Only 100 respondents get an explicit revenue share
Revenue share important to about one third of 087 users
If revenue sharing on 0870 was withdrawn
two thirds would absorb the loss of revenue or find some other charging mechanism
Mystery Shopping
No evidence of artificial extension of call holding times
Most callers connected immediately (80%)
Most of the rest connected within 1 minute
However, large organisations (turnover >£10m) do take much longer to connect callers to an agent
Consumer quantitative research
Price perception similar to previous research
0845 – 26ppm
0870 – 36ppm
Strong support for return to geographic charging on 0845 and 0870, but also some support for revenue sharing
Mixed views on announcements
Most consumers think they should be provided
But 60% think they would be annoying
Rickard Granberg asked what proportion of calls to Ofcom contact centre related to actual 0870 call charges rather than incorrect perceptions of call charges. Clive Hillier said that Ofcom didn’t have this breakdown.

Chris Pace and Fabienne Dischamps said that Ofcom’s initial rationale for conducting the review (Pricing Transparency, Price V.s Value, Public Service use and Call centre waiting times) had identified only the issue of pricing transparency as a consumer problems and asked why Ofcom hadn’t suggested a remedy to combat this issue.

Andy May asked why Ofcom was proposing to restore the geographic link on 0870 and not 0845? Gareth Davis said that there would be fewer benefits and more costs involved in restoring the link on 0845.

Colin Scott said that if these proposals were to be implemented following the initial 1 year period 0845 would be more expensive than 0870 on some call plans. Gareth said that pricing guidance on 0845 would mitigate this problem.

Andy May said that many companies questioned by Ofcom aren’t likely to know the additional costs they will face if revenue share is removed (ie. The costs of intelligent call routing, call stats etc will need to be recovered).

Karen Wray asked if consumer perceptions of 0871 were very different from 0870. Clive Hillier said he couldn’t quote the research findings chapter and verse but the research indicated that 0871 was less expensive than PRS but more expensive than 0870.

Karen Wray said that if 10% of 0870 users moved their services to more expensive 0871 services which would mean a worse outcome for consumers, would Ofcom plan to initiate another consultation? Gareth said that no further consultations were planned.

Fabienne Dischamps asked if a public information campaign was planned. Gareth Davis said Ofcom weren’t planning to launch a campaign but he hoped the industry would inform consumers of the changes and noted that Ofcom intended to propose a modification to General Condition 14 to require OCPs to give more prominence to NTS call charges.

Gareth said that following the consultation a statement would be published, most likely in January 2006.

Karen Wray made the point that Ofcom originally launched the NTS Framework re-examination project as an access and interconnection review, however these concerns seem to have been replaced by a consumer based review.

Alex Cheetham asked if Ofcom had an update on the call termination market view. Gareth said that Ofcom still planned to publish in early August.

Agenda item (3): 0844 / 0871 Short Duration
Rob Day provided the background to this issue. Rob said that OCCNs had now been issued to all operators with the relevant 0844 & 0871 numbers. Of the 41 chargebands are affected, only 16 have live traffic. For those services with no traffic to sample, the average durations have been used. BT would also be issuing NCCNs to amend 0844 / 0871 charges for BT terminated traffic with effect from 1 September 2005.

The effective date on the OCCN is the 1 st of September 2005. Rob said that BT would also accept retrospective invoices for revised 0844 and 0871 traffic back to the 1 st of October 2004 for BT Originated traffic, with retrospection to 1 October 2004 provided on a reciprocal basis.

The OCCN contains details on the methodology used by BT. Rob said that BT were planning to conduct quarterly reviews on the rates.

Chris Pace asked why October 2004 had been picked. Rob Day said that in BT’s view volumes weren’t material prior to this as volumes increased markedly at the back end of 2004, hence October was a reasonable offer. A debate followed on what could be interpreted as material.

Mike Barford said that he would take an action to co-ordinate views from FG members on a start date for long/short on 0844 and 0871 and then pick this up with BT.

continued...

Attendance:

Colin Scott  THUS (Chair)
Gareth Davies  Ofcom
Caroline Chandan-Roels  Ofcom
Karen Wray  C&W
Clive Hillier  Ofcom
Dirmuid Jennings  Reality Telecom
Nancy Saunders  Kingston
Dave Simpson  Easynet
Chris Pace  IV Response
Rickard Granberg  Opal Telecom
Toby Higho  Centrica
Tim Stephens  C&W
Jim Ashton  C&W
Andrew Wileman  Telewest
Helen Morgan  Energis
Andy May  Energis
Rickard Granberg  Carphone Warehouse
Kath Embleton  BT
Rob Day  BT
Mark Amoss  BT
Alex Cheetham  BT
Dominic Carney  Your Communications
Sarajane Amey  NTL
Fabienne Dischamps  Band-X
Mike Barford  Tiscali
Richard Anderson  COLT

...

Agenda item (3): Update on the NTS Retail Uplift second stage consultation
Geoff Brighton said that Ofcom had received responses on the retail uplift consultation from Tiscali, Energis, BT, UKCTA and a confidential response from Wanadoo. Geoff said Ofcom hoped to get the final statement published by the end of June (however it would definitely be out by August at the latest).

Becky Hewlett asked if Ofcom decided to go for Option 3c, would a further consultation be required. Geoff said that Ofcom lawyers had advised that because option 3c was discussed in the original consultation, a further consultation wouldn’t be required.

Agenda Item (4) – NGNP interaccounting (Mike Barford)
Mike explained that this issue related to the differentials between POLOs in portability scenarios – made acute since the introduction of NCCN 500.

Mike said he had received feedback from BT asking for the issue to be raised at the Number Portability Commercial Group, however Mike had asked for the SoR to be accepted and now had confirmation back from BT that the SoR was now working its way through the process.

Mike said he was keen to keep discussion on this topic within the NTS FG. Colin Annette said he believed the Number Portability Group were the appropriate experts to deal with the issue.

Richard Anderson said he had attended the Number Portability Commercial group and despite its name, it mainly focused on processes (not commercials).

Tim Stephens said given the issue was raised at the NTS FG, would it not be appropriate to keep it within this Group. Colin Annette suggested a sub-group of the NTS FG.

Debbie Mulloy asked if BT had no commercial issues. Colin Annette said the issue needed to be resolved.

Mike Barford agreed to organise a NTS FG working group to liaise with BT over the issue.

New Action: #T/1 : Mike Barford to establish an NTS FG working group with the aim of resolving the NGNP issue.

Colin Annette said the outcome of the work would need to be fed back to both groups. Mike Barford said that in the meantime the SoR would still be progressed by BT.

Agenda Item (5) – Long and Short on 0844 / 0871
Rob Day said following the NTS FG in April he had given operators two weeks to come back to him with comments on the proposed methodology for distributing the minimum call fee on 0844 and 0871 services. No feedback has been received and the methodology had now been put forward in a paper to the BT Pricing Board for formal approval. Once the paper had been agreed within BT (expected in the next two/three weeks) a formal industry notification would be issued.

Becky Hewlett asked when the methodology would apply from. Rob confirmed that the date was still to be established (ie. when volumes were material) but this was sometime before Christmas ’04.

Fabienne Dischamps asked if the retrospection would apply to transit traffic. Colin Annette said it would not.

Tim Stephens asked what review mechanism BT would implement over the calculation. Colin Annette said it would probably be conducted at the annual review in April. Tim asked how the retrospective overpayments would be recovered – would BT accept an invoice. Colin Annette said the normal process for retrospection would be followed.

Chris Pace asked how much of an uplift Communication Providers could expect. Rob Day said it varied depending on the chargeband and average duration – anything between 2% - 15%, but as the bulk of calls (98%) were long duration – the uplift wouldn’t be significant.

continued...

Thanks idb. That must have been some hard work!

juby

Just two bits stand out to me:

market research findings:

If revenue sharing on 0870 was withdrawn two thirds would absorb the loss of revenue or find some other charging mechanism.

. . .


if 10% of 0870 users moved their services to more expensive 0871 services which would mean a worse outcome for consumers, would Ofcom plan to initiate another consultation? . . . no further consultations were planned.

Quote:
That's a pretty good summary!

On the surface, some aspects of these proposals seem to be beneficial, but looking deeper at the whole scheme, it is a complete balls-up. After all this time, including public consultation, this 'dog's dinner' is the best that Ofcom can come up with. Quite staggering really. It will be interesting to see what will be published.

Where is the consultation document, expected August 3? More Ofcom delay and dithering.

Interesting point from May 19 meeting:

"Nancy Saunders asked if the recent information supplied by communication providers under Ofcom’s formal powers was exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. Clive Hillier said this issued had been raised previously in another area and Ofcom could confirm that such information was subject to a statutory exemption. "

The rip-off providers are so afraid of the true extent of the scam from being made public that they have to hide behind exemptions.

Incidentally I had to ask Ofcom for these minutes. It did not respond to my requests, so I submitted a FOI request for the minutes. This seemed to wake-up the public servants who now stated that the minutes were about to be published anyway. I withdrew the FOI request but the notes still did not appear. A further request on Monday yielded the result.

The minutes of the August 11 meeting will be interesting. I'll make another request for these in due course.

Well, for all we know they may already have applied "redactions" to what they have published!

However, all I can say is why are there any expressions of surprise? What else did you really expect. Their way of appearing to take some action it seems will just be to move the whole scam onto other prefixes at least one of which will be even more expensive. That message is probably supposed to imply "that's what you get for campaigning; now keep quiet or we will make it even worse for consumers next time!"

The most important feature of all is that as expected they evidently do not intend to prohibit call queuing on revenue-generating numbers! This continues the deliberate and blatant contravention not only of the National Numbering Plan, but also above all of the principal established as part of the National Numbering Plan that call queuing should not be allowed with revenue-generating numbers, because if it were there clearly would always be a propensity for revenue-generating call receivers to protract the duration of such calls as much as possible!

I can only draw your attention to my sign-off at the bottom of this posting.