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

ADSL2+ Annex M Product Launch - We now have access to an LLU ADSL2+ Annex M service.  Giving up to 2.5Mb upstream bandwidth and 16Mb downstream bandwidth, this is a true next generation business-class ADSL service.Along with this service we have successfully added the ADSL2 + range of enhanced broadband services to our platform and are now able to offer these improved services where local exchanges support it. We will provide these services by default if your local exchange has access to them. 

With business coverage for 55% of the UK over 1000 exchanges, this really is the next leap in ADSL technology.  Our partner Griffin Internet will be launching further engineered versions of this product shortly, which will give much higher guaranteed through puts and performance SLAs. Griffin has been trialling this service for many months now, with a view to getting the best speeds, and as Annex M is exceedingly sensitive to different router firmware and needs a fast processor in the CPE, they have spent much of there time trialling different manufacturers’ products to connect it with.

The best router we have found for upload speed so far is the Draytek 2820 range and the Zyxel P660H – D1, We will therefore be using these router when supply of an Annex M product is called for. Costing from £165.00 +VAT these are recommended by us for the Annex M product.

LinkLocal Networking Exhibition

Express Telephony will be an Exhibitor at the linkLocal Show at the Stevenage Holiday Inn on May 17th and it should be a great exhibiton of local businesses in the SG Postal area.

FREE LOCAL BUSINESS EVENT• Guest speakers • 30+ exhibiting local businesses • Local FREE networking opportunity • FREE Business Advice Clinics

Turn up free to meet with others that want to do business in the SG Postal area

Book in at Business Growth Show

Register at http://www.linklocal.biz

Hope to see you there!

Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) are required to provide customers with an accurate estimate of the maximum speed their broadband service can support at either the point of sale to the customer, in the shop, over the phone or on their Internet website under a new voluntary Code of Practice published recently by Ofcom the Telecommunications Regulator. Other steps required by the code which aims to ensure greater clarity in broadband markets include:-

1. Resolving technical issues to improve speed and offering customers the choice to move onto lower speed packages when published speeds are not met.
2. Ensuring all sales and promotional staff have a proper understanding of the products so they can explain the meaning of the estimates given out to potential customers.
3. Providing estimates on usuage limits and alerting customers when they are about to or have breached them.
4. Ofcom is urging all fixed line ISP’s to sign up to the code of practice and implement it within sixs months of signing.
5. ‘Voluntary code of practice: broadband speeds’ is available at HTTP://tinyurl.com/6eotts
6. Advice for consumers on broadband speeds is available at the same web address.

 Ofcom can be contacted on 0845 456 3000

(News Source coutesy of FSB Voice of Business www.fsb.org.uk/111)

Dialling (020) 3 for London – As London 020 7 and 020 8 numbers become increasingly hard to find Ofcom has launched a new range of London telephone numbers, starting with (020) 3. These are being used alongside the existing (020) 7 and (020) 8 numbers to increase capacity.

  They are to be given out to some residential and business customers who put in a new lines or apply for a new telephone number range for VoIP services and were avaiable from the autumn of 2005 onwards.

If you’ve got a (020) 7 or (020) 8 number – don’t worry. You do not have to change your number. All you need to remember is that when you see an (020) 3 telephone number, it’s a London number, just like (020) 7 and (020) 8 – and of course the cost of a call is the same.

Section 56 of the Communications Act 2003 requires Ofcom to publish a National Telephone Numbering Plan and to review that Plan as required; Section 63 of the Act requires Ofcom to seek the best use of appropriate telephone numbers and to encourage efficiency and innovation.

Ofcom has introduced the extra (020) 3 numbers because London is growing, and more people and businesses want additional telephone numbers. Please find more information below on how Ofcom will allocate the additional (020) 3 numbers to telecoms companies – who will then in turn allocate these to their customers.

http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/market-data-research/telecoms-research/numbering-research/london_telephone/

OFCOM ANNOUNCES NEW NUMBER RANGE PROPOSALS - Ofcom 0870 proposals Ofcom has laid down its proposals for the 0870 number range and other numbering schemes, following completion of its consultation last year with the Communications Industry.

 The 08 numbering range for chargeable services will be restructured, Ofcom says. New numbers will be banded by price and the type of service they provide, to allow an association to be built in the consumers mind. This is based on the idea that the lower the number following the 08, such as 082, the lower the charge, versus for instance 089.

This proposal compliments work already underway to change the current 084 and 087 numbering ranges. An 06 number range will be introduced for personalised numbers, Ofcom proposes, which will eventually replace today’s 070 personal numbers, both of which will have a price ceiling introduced. Ofcom says 070 numbers are often confused with mobile numbers by consumers.

This move will prevent scams as 06 will be easily identifiable, and will allow 07 numbers to be clearly associated with mobile phones. The regulator proposes that it will create a new, country-wide number range on 03. This will be charged at the same rate as geographic numbers, which will enable businesses requiring a national presence to use this range without charging a premium.

This range could also be offered in low-cost call packages by fixed or mobile operators. These proposals are again being consulted upon and we bring you news of any changes as soon as they are published by Ofcom.

EXPRESS TELEPHONY ADDS MURPHX BROADBAND RANGE  murphx Innovative Solutions Ltd are a Pan European, Tier 1 connectivity wholesaler and we have added their whole product range to our platform to enable us to offer an alternative set of products and services to our customers.

This is not done to slight our Partnership with other Partners and in fact will enable us to take on business we would otherwise loose to other resellers as a result of not being able to offer a real alternative connection for use as failover etc. Currently if we use one provider for all services to customer premises even with two ADSL circuits installed as failover we risk losing both services in the event of a failure. 

It is likely therefore that even with failover services installed for customers willing to pay for additional circuits that the customer will lose connection to the Internet in the event of a major outage. With two services from different sources we can now offer a truly resilient service that can ensure customers broadband stay running if they run mission critical applications in their businesses. Many customers use a £30.00 broadband service to run a Multimillion pound business and as there are no practical service level agreements in place enforceable in law it falls on the company using our Broadband Services to ensure they have a suitable failover service in place to avoid costly downtime and consequent loss of business as a result. 

Our advice to customers is to take a look at your business and decide if it can cope with broadband down time. If your business will lose money as a result of the service being down then you need to evaluate if a failover solution is a viable alternative and cost effective for your business to implement and use. If your business looses a few emails and you can’t surf the net for a while then you probably don’t need a second broadband connection.

 Murphyx were chosen because as an aggregator they manage many different service providers products giving us a large number of possible connections to suit most environments. This enables us to pick from the best and ensure our customers get the absolute best products and services available to do the job they ask of the broadband we supply them. Express Broadband products and services offer our customers a fantastic range to pick from now and we expect with fibre to the cabinet coming later this year to be able to increase our range still further.  

For more information or advice about any of the services we offer contact  or phone 0800 0522323 sales@expresstelephony.co.uk

The UK’s regulator, Ofcom, has decided to change the rules that apply to 0870 numbers. Operators will be required to charge callers no more to call an 0870 number than it costs them to call a “geographic number”, with a dialling code starting with 01 or 02. As a result, the amount callers will be charged will reduce substantially, essentially eliminating the chance for organisations using 0870 numbers to generate revenue.

How this change affects your business;

From July 2009 the cost of calling 0870 numbers will be dramatically reduced and all revenue sharing will cease. This means that ‘Number Providers’ will lose their revenue stream and therefore will start charging you for your incoming calls in order to make their revenue.

Your business will pay to receive incoming calls on your 0870 numbers
 

Why the changes?

 Initially 0870 numbers were charged to callers at the same rate of the cost of calling an 01 or 02 number, around 7p + vat.  More recently, the cost of calling 01 & 02 numbers has been significantly reduced, and they now cost closer to 3p + vat. The price of 0870 numbers did not change, which meant that they became viewed by customers as premium rate calls.  In response to complaints, OFCOM have decided to reduce call costs to 0870 numbers, to bring them into line.

Express Telephony can guide you through the following options; 

Option 1 – Keep your existing 0870 numbers

Keep your existing 0870 numbers.  From July 2009 you will be charged a ‘pence per minute’ rate to receive calls/faxes.  Each month your ‘Number Provider’ will bill you for your total calls received and you will have to pay this bill.

Option 2 – Change your numbers to 0871

Costing 8.5ppm to call (excluding VAT), 0871 again has all the benefits of 0870 is ideal for generating a higher revenue stream from incoming calls, due to the call cost.  Please be aware that ICSTIS the governing body for premium rate in the UK will be governing this code and this presents further problems.

Option 3 – Change your numbers to 0844

These cost 4.25ppm to call (excluding VAT), almost half the current cost of calling 0870 but with all the benefits, including a rebate dependent upon call volume.  Many companies have already changed to 0844, making this option a popular choice. 

Option 4 – Change your numbers to 0845

Your callers will only pay local rate charges.  Calls are charged at 3.5p per minute (excluding VAT) to the caller and local rate 0845 has been used in the UK for over 10 years and is well established.

Option 5 – Change your numbers to 0800

Free phone numbers mean that you pay for your customers’ calls. This option is a powerful marketing tool as it tells your customers that you value their business. The rate you pay depends on the volume of calls you receive and is typically around 3.5p per minute. 

Your course of action;

• Think about the impact that the above options might have on your business. 
• Act now and give yourself time to implement the changes
• Call Express Telephony to discuss your requirements and the implications.

OFCOM documents

The following are web links to the Ofcom website which explain the 0870 changes:-

Summary
http://www.ofcom.org.uk/consult/condocs/nts_forward/statement/#2

http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/consultations/0870calls/summary

Full Document
http://www.ofcom.org.uk/consult/condocs/nts_forward/statement/statement.pdf

For more details about NGN numbers or to place an order contact our sales department on 0800 0522323 or email sales@expresstelephony.co.uk