Ofcom has today published a statement
on how we will regulate the wholesale markets that underpin
landline and mobile telephone calls in the UK, for the
period between April 2021 and March 2026.
Call termination
When people call a UK mobile or landline number, the
caller’s network provider pays a wholesale charge to the
recipient’s phone company for connecting the call. This is
called a ‘termination rate’.
To continue to protect customers from high prices, we are
capping termination rates for calls made and received in
the UK, based on the cost of connecting a call. This
includes:
- For calls to mobiles, the cap will be 0.379p per minute
next year, which is lower than the current cap of 0.468p
per minute. We will also continue applying this mobile
termination cap to calls to ‘070’ numbers.
- For calls to landlines, we will maintain the current
cap of 0.0292p per minute in real terms.
- When someone calls a UK number from abroad, we propose
that UK providers should charge no more than the rate they
are charged when their customers make calls to that
international destination.
Call origination and interconnection
Currently, some phone companies still use BT’s wholesale
‘call origination’ service to enable their customers to
make calls on their landline. Over the next few years,
landline calls will be increasingly carried over more
modern, Internet Protocol (IP) networks. So we will
deregulate wholesale call origination, as providers will no
longer need to purchase it from BT.
As industry moves away from using the traditional telephone
network, we expect companies will increasingly interconnect
with each other using the more modern IP interconnection
networks. So we have set out how we will regulate BT’s IP
interconnection service.
