Ofcom recently published a statement on how it will regulate the wholesale markets that underpin landline and mobile phone calls in the United Kingdom between April 2021 and March 2026.
To continue to protect customers from high prices, Ofcom will cap termination rates for calls made and received in the United Kingdom, based on the cost of connecting a call:
- For calls to mobiles, the cap will be £0.379 per minute next year, which is lower than the current cap of £0.468 per minute. Ofcom will also continue to apply this mobile termination cap to calls to 070 numbers.
- For calls to landlines, Ofcom will maintain the current cap of £0.0292 per minute in real terms.
- When someone calls a UK number from abroad, Ofcom proposes that UK providers should charge no more than the rate that they are charged when their customers make calls to that international destination.
Some phone companies still use BT's wholesale call origination service to enable customers to make calls on landlines. Over the next few years, landline calls will be increasingly carried over more modern internet protocol networks. Therefore, Ofcom will deregulate wholesale call origination, as providers will no longer need to purchase it from BT.
As the industry moves away from using the traditional telephone network, Ofcom expects that companies will increasingly interconnect using the more modern internet protocol interconnection networks. Accordingly, Ofcom's statement sets out how it will regulate BT's internet protocol interconnection service.
