firestop wrote on Dec 7^th, 2005 at 8:03am:


Hey I have had various things going on personally since then and was also concluding my Response to Ofcom's Way Forward consultation which turned out to be a 15 pager to match that of idb.  Actually number of pages is down to point size and Font so lets see how many pages it comes out at when Ofcom have converted it to PDF and possibly a standard Font?

I also didn't appreciate your earlier comments in this thread which were really rather rude.  At least I Sonny and Fabian all went to Ofcom, unlike at least 30 other people in this forum who were given the opportunity and then claimed that work etc was more important to them. Do you think you should possibly consider the forum name Flamethrower instead?

In essence Ofcom spent a long time in the two hours by getting Clive Hillier to take us through a presentation of their Way Forward Consultation and all the politically correct claptrap that they think justifies no action at all on 0844 and allowing the 0845 scam to continue for two years after 0870.

Mr Hiller was constantly interrupted after almost every item by yours truly to point out the fallacy in his arguments and was ably backed up by our friend Sonny who is newish to the forum but as relentlessly committed to the crusade as any regulars here.  Indeed he has spent a career in IT and also worked latterly for Colt Telecoms.  Fabian also chipped in with a few choice comments.

The only other people of note at the meeting were Marc Michaels at the COI, who made a very good case why government contact centres did not want to use 0800 (crank calls and unduly high running costs due to revenue share in reverse) but saying that the COI couldn't tolerate the delay envisaged by Ofcom in taking action and also that leaving 0845 costing more than 0870 was going to be very difficult to explain.  There was also a gentleman representing Citizens Advice Bureau who started off justifying why they used 0845 but then came round to the view they would never have used them had there been an NGN code that was charged at geographic rates but that still gave them all the call rerouting facilities with their non voip calling systems.

There was a lady from Which who said from what she could understand that these 0845 and 0870 numbers were not good for consumers but she was new to this and didn't understand it too well.  Actually she was trying it wasn't her fault that nobody very senior from Which was sent along.

There were a whole lot of people there from places like the DTI and the Ofcom Consumer Panel who made absolutely no worthwhile contribution and then finally an excellent guy called Don Jayasuriya from the Ofcom Advisory Committee for England who in a slightly less outraged and confrontational way than myself made some very telling points about why all this was so bad for the consumer.

Ofcom of course stuck to their guns and gave us the rather lame excuse from Sean Williams (Ofcom's Competition Partner and soon to be board member who chaired the meeting) that the people who wrote the NTS Options for the Future consultation had now all left Ofcom and were all former OFTEL people so we couldn't blame his current staff for all that.  This of course just made us SayNoto0870 types even more cross.

Ofcom got the message that people weren't at all happy with their proposals but as to whether they choose to listen that's down to political pressure they are applying elsewhere.  I wonder if Which have responded formally to the consultation.  If  not its clearly an utter disgrace on their part.

More details with attendee list etc when I get a moment.