RNS Number : 8697T
Office of Communications
30 March 2021
30 March 2021
Ofcom review of wholesale call markets
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.
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