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Ofcom's whole position is utterly insane as forcing a voice call centre on 0845 to move to 0870 so as to only charge customers geographic rates will involve them in a lot of marketing, cost and potential lost callers.

Whereas 0845 dial up customers are in an ongoing daily/weekly relationship with the customer and can easily send a customer an email and/or a web link to let him change the phone number just once.  If the customer can't connect he will soon contact the company (on their 0870 or 09 number so costing them little) to resolve matters.  But the 0845 voice operator finds its old yellow pages ads and publicity leaflets etc totally worthless if they switch to 0870.  More likely they would have to set up an 0870 too and then keep the 0845 for all those reading the old ads.

But the unfairness to the voice operators of charging more for their 0845 calls compared to 0870 compared to the minor inconvenience to the rapidly dieing 0845 dial ISP marketplace of switching each remaining customer once to another number should have meant that the dial up ISP people had to change their numbers and that 0845 voice numbers were charged as geographic on the same new rate as 0870.

But where have some of the most senior staff of Ofcom come from?  Well Stephen Carter comes from NTL and Matt Peacock comes from AOL.  So what a surprise that they have favoured the dialup ISP business interests of those companies at the expense of thousands of charities and local government call centres who originally picked 0845 to try to offer callers the lowest possible call rate.

I tried to tell Ofcom their proposal from the NTS Focus Groups was utterly insane and to call it off but no they went ahead saying how great their proposals on 0870 were and totally hiding the disgrace on 0845 and also the fact that none of this may happen for 18 months or more.

Ofcom are a total disgrace and are not fulfilling the remit given to them by parliament but none of us seem to have the power to do anything about it.

Dave,

As I understand the Ofcom press release their proposal is that 0870 call rates are synchronised woth geographic national call rates much earlier than 0845 are synchronised with geographic local call rates.  0845 will remain on the old BT Standard call tariffs for at least a year longer than 0870.

But admittedly I haven't read the consultation yet!  How did they end up with over 100 pages more than their original consulation though?  Surely they should have been able to move closer to actuall conclusions as a result of the responses received?

Can I assume that again Ofcom is listing various possible solutions but is expressing its own preference for just one of those solutions and that is the one they are publicising in their press release as though it was definitely going to happen even though it is only a consultation?

I would assume there is no way that 1899, 18866 etc will be able to offer 0845 and 0870 at the same rate as GNs from what is in the proposals?  They will just have a call price announcement instead saying they cost more as is already the case?

The key thing though is that their consultation is once again written only in industryspeak and made so lengthy that only telecoms industry hired hands plus a few diehards on this forum will be motivated to respond.

It is a complete outrage they don't have a web form for response and can't summarise the key issues for the public to respond on in no more than 5 or 10 pages.  But then Ofcom is only there to make life easy for its telecoms industry chums whatever it may claim.

It is ridiculous that we should be having to wade through another 250 pages.

Ofcom are a disgrace.  They should be closed down.

Hang on guys,

I think some of you seem to be in danger of being taken in by the bamboozle! As I have suggested previously the reason that, as you correctly conclude should have been the case, Ofcom seem not to have arrived at or any nearer to any supposed "conclusions" as a direct result of their last two "consultations", and should have thus now have been able to summarise any remaining issues succinctly is that this large document is a smoke screen! It is a deliberate red herring.

This overkill, verbose document has been deliberately produced to muddy the waters and avoid taking the regulatory action which they know full well they should take now under the Acts, which they are so fond of quoting. They know that if they confuse the general public with a document like this, which goes round and round in circles, avoiding the real issues and regurgitating all the previous nonsense which they have published concerning NGN abuses, but with all the elements moved around and well mixed up, few consumers will respond to yet another seemingly complex consultation. Then Ofcom will eventually be able to claim with some impunity - "Well we had a really comprehensive final "consultation" about this and hardly any consumers responded, so they must be happy with what we are going to do. They can then apply exactly what they had planned in the first place, namely do a bit of juggling with numbers to make it appear as if there have been some regulatory changes, but in reality keep all of the scams going as at present, where necessary with slightly different 08 sub-categories and perhaps a few cost announcements as a sop!

Also of course, to state as they do in their "consultation" document that "0871 numbers could be re-classified as Premium Rate numbers" fully exposes that this is all bamboozle. I must emphasize yet once again that it was the regulator who originally took the decision to move all Premium numbers to the 09 prefix category. This was what was defined in the New National Numbering Plan, and was done so that consumers could know clearly which numbers are Premium numbers by the 09 prefix, and to ensure that queueing was prohibited on all Premium numbers. You can see by this statement in their "consultation" document that what Ofcom are doing all of the time is to avoid the real issues, since their controllers do not want the scams to end, most of all with queuing!

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I agree dorf. This issue affects consumers greatly, and because consumers don't (and shouldn't have to) understand the ins and outs of how the 'internal framework' operates, the two should be kept separate as far as consulting goes.

Reading consumers' responses from the previous consultation (Options for the Future) shows what the 'citizen-consumer' thinks. Ofcom has started again from square one, consulting both consumers and industry alike.

I've just heard what I believe to be evidence of a change of heart by Auntie BBC.

You & Yours daily at 12 noon . The presenter asked for listeners to  call then mentioned 0870 but immediately (with a sound surprise in his voice ) mentioned that the number to call was 0800*****.

Hurrah. Long Live The Queen ! (and all who sail in her)

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You know that somtimes they ask callers to cal the 0870 and press some option on the afternoon show (mayo blokie?), even though the 0500 works alongside it