Tanllan wrote on Jan 8^th, 2006 at 10:31pm:


As you know I was already always an ardent conspiracy theorist so far as the relationship between OFTEL (who originally took on 2a Southwark Bridge Road from BT I imagine) and BT was concerned but to now learn of this disgrace only further enhances my pre-existing conviction of Ofcom and OFTEL before it being basically in BT's pocket.

I've just received my latest telephone bill and contained within it is BT chief propaganda leaflet, BT Update.

Why is it that it is always behind in those pesky price increases? No mention of the latest; the minimum charge going up. However there is talk about the increase in line rental of 50p. Shouldn't this have been printed at least three months ago before the increase? 

The booklet starts with a message from Ms Jillian G Lewis, Customer Services Director, entitled "Important information for BT customers - our commitment to value." The first paragraph mentions the aforementioned increases:
Quote:


Let's look at this statement in more detail:
At BT, we are committed to providing great value for all our customers, by constantly developing innovative new products and delivering high quality services.
Business speak for "We are providing a service."

To continue to do this, it's occasionally necessary to raise some of our prices a little.
Just how occasional are price rises that seem to be occuring every month? The sentence ends by saying that prices are being raised "a little."

So from 1st January 2006, our basic line rental price increased by 50p for some customers.
So all of those little but occasional changes have resulted in BT's effective basic line rental increasing by 50% within two years.

We understand that price rises are never welcome, so we will continue to innovate and introduce new products like BT Privacy and Friends & Family Auto Update, which give you extra benefits and help you save money.
More business speak for "We will allow certain 'reductions' to counteract those price increases for those customers who generate the most revenue for us." BT Privacy being a new 'innovative product' combining caller display that has been charged for all these years and inclusion on the Telephone Preference Service list, something that any UK citizen may register for regardless. Friends & Family Auto Update, a service that conveniently excludes 0845 numbers such as those used (by fewer and fewer) pay as you go ISPs.

Now I agree with Ms Lewis that price rises are never welcome. However, the common ground stops there. If the water companies put up rates and made an effort to curb leaks by taking on extra staff, then I think we would agree that the increase is a worthwhile one.

But BT waffles on about creating 'products' which, IMO, aren't worthy of such increases and are invariably ways of charging the low user more and giving the benefits to high users.

bill wrote on Apr 1^st, 2006 at 7:12pm:


Due to an edit of my earlier post you will find that your comments have been left high and dry.

Dave wrote on Apr 2^nd, 2006 at 4:59pm:
I believe part of the reason for the 50p increase was due to bloody useless ofcon insisting that there should be a wider difference in price between basic residential line rental (BT Compulsion 1) and what BT charge for WLR.  This is fine but had Ofcon thought in advance or used a little anticipation then they could have made BT do this and force BT to keep the cost of the basic residential line rental the same so in other words force BT to reduce their profit margins slightly instead of BT increasing costs elsewhere to make up for the shortfall in revenue.

Ofcon, as usual, didn't use their brains!  Something similar happened when they forced the mobile networks to reduce their connection rates for calls terminating on their own networks.  The mobile networks reluctantly agreed to this but at the same time increased rates in other areas such as texts, etc.

In my opinion, it is pointless Ofcon forcing any of price changes on telecom providers unless they (ofcon) stipulate that they can't increase prices in other areas to compensate the loss of all those revenues they receive.

From the telecom companies point of view, they don't want to lose all that revenue so if they're forced to reduce their prices in one area then they simply increase them in other areas to compensate.  This of course applies to all companies and not just telecom companies.