5 Apr
Ofcom cutting the cost of cross network calls!
Posted on 2010 under Mobile Networks, Mobile News, Ofcom | Comments are offOfcom has today announced plans to change the ‘ termination rates’ which, refers to the cost incurred when connecting to a mobile phone from another network or from a fixed landline. Currently the rates are set until 2011 but calls have been made to review this, once expired.
The current rate is set at around 4.3p with plans to drop this to as low as 0.5 p by 2015, which is excellent news for consumers given that Ofcom has said that “As rates fall and operators adapt, consumers will benefit from cheaper calls and competition in both the UK fixed telecoms and mobile markets.” It has been suggested that larger networks such as , and / will be the only entities likely to object to these changes, but this is only down to the increased competition the lower charges will give to smaller operators whose user’s will spend more time on other networks and would therefore incur less charges with the new rate changes.
The good news doesn’t stop there however, it has also been decided that the current time allowance for a network to provide a PAC (Porting Authorisation Code) is too long and it will soon be enforced that networks will have to issue the PAC immediately, or within two hours at maximum; by way of text message and the actual process of porting is also set to be sped up, moving from the current 48 hours to 24 hours. This will mean that, anyone wishing to port their current number to another network, should technically be ble to do so within 24 hours of the inital PAC request.