Express Telephony

Ofcom today confirmed that rollover contracts, which tie landline and broadband customers into repeated minimum contract periods unless they opt out, will be banned from December this year. 

http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/consultations/arcs/statement/Guidance9_3.pdf

The contracts, also known as Automatically Renewable Contracts (ARCs), roll forward to a new minimum contract period – with penalties for leaving – unless the customer actively opts out of the renewal. The ban will apply to ARCs for landline and broadband services sold to residential and small business customers.

BT is the largest communications provider currently offering these contracts and Ofcom estimates that approximately 15 per cent of UK residential consumers are on rollover contracts.  Other residential providers include Adept Telecom, Axis Telecom, Eze Talk and iTalk, while TalkTalk Business, Titan Telecoms, and Optimum Calls offer ARCs to business users.

Ofcom Chief Executive, Ed Richards, said: “Ofcom’s evidence shows that ARCs raise barriers to effective competition by locking customers into long term deals with little additional benefit. Our concern about the effect of ARCs and other ‘lock in’ mechanisms led to our decision to ban them in the communications sector.”

Removing rollover contracts from the market

Ofcom has set out a timetable for the removal of rollover contracts from the telecoms market which takes account of systems changes that will need to be made by communications providers. 

The sale of new automatically renewable contracts to residential and small business customers will be prohibited from 31 December 2011.

Ofcom will also require communications providers to move all residential and small business customers currently on rollover contracts to alternative deals, and to completely remove rollover contracts from the market by 31 December 2012.

Ofcom has published its statement on ARCs on its website: 

For the record, Express Telephony wherever possible offers 1 month contract periods with one months notice to terminate the contract and no penalties to pay. The exception to this sadly is Superfast Broadband from BT, the fibre optic service and EFM leased line services with minium 12 month contracts. We are activly seeking to negotiate out these contract terms with our providers also but realise hardware costs from vendors takes a lot longer to recover than a month or two.



BT chief executive Ian Livingston has outlined the company’s vision for Broadband Britain to the Prime Minister, David Cameron, and the cabinet.

The Prime Minister and the cabinet were visiting BT’s research headquarters at Adastral Park near Ipswich in Suffolk, which has long been the centre of BT’s R&D activities and the home for a cluster of supporting high tech companies.

Livingston explained how the UK is set to strengthen its position as one of Europe’s leading broadband nations thanks to BT’s investment and the funds that the Government is making available via Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK).

The BT chief executive told the cabinet how the UK’s communications infrastructure could be transformed. Within the next five or six years, fibre based services could be available to more than 90% of UK premises with the majority able to access broadband speeds of up to 100Mbps or above.

Livingston also reassured the cabinet that this fibre investment would benefit areas that do not currently enjoy fast speeds.

This is because the number of homes unable to achieve more than 2Mbps is set to plummet from 12 per cent of homes to less than two per cent. He also updated the cabinet on how BT is trialling new technologies such as TV White Space and LTE to improve this still further.

Livingston said “I’m delighted to be able to welcome the Prime Minister and the cabinet to Adastral Park. This is the home of the research and development that supports progress in many areas of technology – from broadband in the UK to global communications networks in the 170 countries in which BT operates.

“Superfast broadband can be a catalyst for economic growth. We have recently recruited a further 800 engineers to help deploy it but it is what it can do for business that is so impressive. The Government has been a great supporter in recognising that this type of infrastructure investment can drive the UK’s long term growth.”

source http://www.comms-dealer.com/industry-news/bt-ceo-sets-out-broadband-vision-pm-and-cabinet