Quote:No idea who Mr Peacock is ???
This, as you correctly assert, is a "forum" as such am I not at liberty to air my views? I'm certainly not an "Ofcom supporter" but I do believe in being reasonable. And most of you are perhaps expecting too much.
You say most people share your views so "surely [it] must be doing something wrong". How enlightening that you believe the majority is always right.
(You're wrong by the way).
Of course you are quite at liberty to express your views. We live in a democracy and also this is a democratically run web forum where posts are very rarely deleted by the moderators and threads in this section are virtually never locked.
But I realise you came to this place perhaps somewhat new in your awareness of the whole 0845 and 0870 higher call cost issue. You don't have as much background in this dispute as we do. And we who have been involved for a very long time observe that the 0845 and 0870 problem has only come about due to regulatory incompetence or complicity by OFTEL (Ofcom's predecessor and from which many staff now work at Ofcom) in allowing this revenue sharing to ever take place on numbers that they OFTEL/Ofcom stupidly also allowed to be called National Rate and Local Rate calls even when this was still no longer true.
You I think have been taken in (as Ofcom naturally hope) by the fact that because they Ofcom have just published another consultation on this matter it appears to you that they they are trying to do something for us the consumers. But the reality is that they published a consultation two years ago which they hid and did not promote and when no one responded they said there was no need to do anything about 0845 and 0870.
Then they issued a consultation last year where they got a very big noise back (including BT) that 0845 and 0870 being premium priced calls was wrong and must stop very soon and after considering those views for 9 months instead of acting to stop the scam they launch a new consultation document finishing in Decemember after which they will presumably take 9 more months to reach a decision making only minimal changes (and inadequate changes in the opinion of most people here) not happening untill another one or two years after that.
So that is why I think your view may have been expressed unaware of all the facts in this matter?
Are you aware that the CEO of Ofcom, Mr Stephen Carter, is the former Chief Operating Officer of NTL for instance and that most other senior Ofcom staff (eg Mr Matt Peacock who came from AOL) have previously been working at senior level in the telecoms and broadcasting industries. So they are not terribly likely to be impartial or unbiased in their views.