As of today BT is reshuffling its phone pricing structure. In a typical move of a power-crazed ex-monopoly, it’s giving with one hand and taking away with another.
The ability to get going on this was given by Ofcom when they lifted restrictions on BT’s UK landline pricing structure.
The ‘giving’
BT hasn’t had the take-up with its bundled packages that it had hoped. From today, subscribers of its Option 2 & 3 package will receive around a third price cut. The included-evening/weekend calls to landline packages will move to £3.95 & the all landline calls to £9.95. This is the packages that they’re trumpeting – shame that most people won’t benefit from it isn’t it?
The other part BT is drawing attention to, is the reduction in price of calls to 0870 and 0845 numbers – the sort of numbers most people have been forced to call to speak to their banks. Oh … and they tell us that they’ve reduced the price of calls to mobile phones.
Almost to add insult to injury, BT is offering all of their 16m subscribes 25p off their monthly line rental at the end of the year- TWENTY FIVE PENCE! We’ve just wasted that typing this. Of course, much to our distress, most broadband services (supplied by BT Wholesale) need to pay the line rental. Why should we? and how much longer can this be allowed to continue? Come on Ofcom.
The ‘taking’
The majority of BT’s 16m customers pay per call on the Option 1 scheme. Sadly for them, things won’t be such a bargain. BT is changing their standard charging unit from per second to per minute – not something that we’ve seen since the wild-west days of early mobile phone companies, where the cowboy operators tried to extract the maximum amount of money from the suckers customers.
We think it more than sneaky that BT have given people Call Minder, their free phone answering service, then charge people a fixed fee (3p) or ‘setting up’ the call, then charging whole minutes. When many people get an answer phone, they hang-up because they don’t want to leave a message, or to try to call their mobile – in the meantime BT will collect the setup fee PLUS a whole minute charge, for a couple of seconds.
As to how much the minute will be – we don’t know. We’ve looked, really we have, pretty hard too – we’ve even tried to use their price list search – but to no avail. Isn’t it a bit of a give away that if you need a search engine for your price list, you’re possibly going to be confusing the customer.
Interestingly, for the first time, BT have listed Skype on their pricing structure on the press release. Welcome to the future BT.
If you’ve got a couple of hours to spare, and fancy trying to extract pricing information, you can have a look at the BT Together site.
A new report has awarded the honours to BT, Virgin, Demon, AOL and Orange as being the UK’s top five consumer ADSL broadband services throughout the second quarter of 2006. 
Gavin Johns, Managing Director of Epitiro said, “Our consumer ADSL testing found that in terms of Internet performance, BT topped the overall rankings for the period April to June 2006. BT was also found to provide the fastest service as a percentage of its theoretical maximum.” 
1 BT 2.78
The planned buy out of the satellite interests of BT Media and Broadcast, the division within UK giant, British Telecom, that operates ‘business to business’ broadcasting industry interests, has fallen at the final fence. 
BT like other large telco’s is finding itself with more Satellite capacity than it can usefully manage, remains committed to a sale and is now considering the long term future of some of its’ other major earth stations. 
To date, most ADSL equipment that BT has put out has been pretty …. functional … or put another way, ugly. Their ethernet routers have been transposed from office equipment, and their USB kit, the Frog as it was known … well don’t get us started on that*. 
BT have clearly had the industrial designers on the case and what they’ve turned out is a bit of a looker. 
What can you connect to it?
The only issue we raised after spending a brief time with it was the usage indicator lights that sit at the top of the unit, which flicker whenever data passes through the box. Sadly, as yet, these can’t be turned off. 
As you may recall, we first reported the 
The transfer and negotiations around the unit are likely to have given BT some food for thought as to how they can manage the disposal of business units they do not see as key, or that are giving rates of return below the main business’s targets. 
BT has today announced its plans to set up wide-area Wi-Fi networks in 12 cities, giving perambulating folks access to high-speed Internet and telecoms services. 
Lovely, lovely Cardiff was the city chosen for the first roll out of the Wireless City scheme, with BT Openzone hotspots being installed in many locations in the city centre. 
BT is also looking to use the service to promote a Wi-Fi version of its BT Fusion mobile phone services which will be launched later this year. 
There had been some excitement, well amongst UK media analysts at least, that BSkyB might loose its dominance of the control of UK football’s Premier League. 
Finally the other company, Irish broadcaster Setanta, had thrown its hat into the ring, originally saying they were going to bid for two of the packages. Those not in the broadcast world wouldn’t necessarily know who Setanta are, but most people will know of their 40% owners, Benchmark Capital. 
Carphone Warehouse are going to stir up a hornet’s nest in the telecoms industry if they go ahead with rumoured plans to introduce a free broadband package in the UK. 
Some industry experts believe that Carphone Warehouse are looking to repeat the soaraway success of fabled freebie ISP Freeserve, who came out of nowhere to overtake BT in the late 90s. 
PR spin-mesisters at Carphone are thought to have christened their broadband campaign “Independence Day”, based on a feeble pun that it will give customers independence from BT. 
New research reveals that around two million Brits have used VoIP packages to place calls over the Internet in the last 12 months, with the figure expected to double by this time next year. 
Sound quality was the most common complaint with 29 per cent citing dissatisfaction with what’s reaching their lug’oles. 
Protecting the VoIP future