John Brown was on holiday on the Kennet and Avon canal. The engine in the boat stopped for no obvious reason and would not start again. The company from which the boat had been hired had suffered a disastrous fire and was operating from one of its own hire boats as an office. I rang the number from a call box to be greeted with a recorded message to ring their mobile engineer who, not surprisingly, had a mobile phone.
I think this must have been the first, and probably the only time I have called a mobile phone from a call box. Except in cases of emergency, avoid doing so; it is very expensive. In this case I had to ring several times before I actually made contact and I had to feed a constant stream of £1 coins into the call box phone in order to do so. I recall that it cost more than £8 to contact the engineer, explain the problem and exactly where we were.
I was, therefore, interested to read in an OFTEL press release that, in March, Don Cruickshank, until recently its Director General, asked the Monopolies and Mergers Commission to investigate the price of calling mobile phones. OFTEL had received many complaints that it was too high. Indeed, in March last year, when OFTEL issued a consultative document about such prices, the cost of calling Cellnet and Vodaphone for a BT customer was a hefty 37.5 pence per minute (ppm). The consultative document said that the price was too high for two reasons: the mobile phone operators were changing BT too much to terminate calls on their networks and BT was adding too much on top of that. Since then prices have fallen slightly, to 32ppm for a daytime call to a mobile phone. But in Mr. Cruikshank’s view this is still too high, it should be about 20ppm
There are now four main operators. As well as Cellnet and Vodaphone there are Orange and One2One. It is big business, around £200 million a year across the four operators. In a way it is tied business because the caller cannot choose in which way to call the mobile number; it has to be via the network provider’s system. In fact it is not always obvious that one is calling a mobile phone. There are other complications, not at once obvious. Different agreements operate between the mobile phone network operators and Cable and Wireless, and the agreements that Orange and One2One have with BT are also different to those that the other two have.
It all reads like an unholy mess. Having been unable to reach agreement with Vodaphone, Cellnet and BT, and for several other reasons including the establishment of a common retail price, OFTEL has called in the Monopolies and Mergers Commission to sort it out. Until they have, I shall try to avoid calling a mobile phone.
This year the AGM will be held on Saturday 26th September at Connaught Hall (part of London University), 41 Tavistock Square, London WC1H 9EX.
The programme has been designed to allow plenty of time for making new contacts and getting together with fellow consumer-minded friends. Coffee will be served from 10.30 am and will be followed at 11 o’clock by a presentation by a Government speaker, followed by general discussion in which all can take part.
The session will end at 12.30 p.m. to allow for drinks before a buffet lunch and the AGM will commence promptly at 2 p.m.
In 1999 we will revert to the weekend pattern more familiar to members, and the event will be held in York.
Don Cruikshank has announced that he will stop The British Fax Directory calling whole ranges of phone numbers automatically just to identify which one has a fax machine connected. Once identified the number is sent junk faxes.
He says that BFD has clearly breached the licence rules for companies which send large numbers of unsolicited faxes. Oftel will not hesitate to take action when companies break their licence rules.
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