Slashdot Mirror

Of course, if you're using the same phone on the new network then the locking problem applies. However in the case of moving network it's usually a case of calling the existing network and asking for it to be unlocked - again, they may charge but I believe most don't under those circumstances, as long as the phone is out of any minimum contract period. And of course there are the slightly dodgy local phone emporiums.

OFTEL, which controls telecommunications in the UK, has a bunch of publications covering network switching - part of their remit is to encourage competition and so they are very much against anything that prevents consumers having a free choice, in theory.

Acording to Oftel (industry regulators) Only 67% of the people in Britain are able to recieve asdl.

Cable isn't really used that much and is not available to lots of the population.

According to NTL & Telewest (practically the only two cable companies) there are around one million suscribers

research shows that there are only around 1.6million users in britain.

So out of a net population of roughly 30 million (50 of the UKs population) only 2.6 million people have broadband.

This means that the most British people that can be expected to use the bbcs content service stands at roughly 2.5 million. Hardly a big dent in sales.
Of course this could change with increased broadband adoption, the level of new people connecting to the internet has practically flatlined though, suggesting that around half the population aren't bothered.

Most of the people buying dvds are buying them for the extras, chances are they've already bought them on vhs or taped them from the telly.

Unsuprisingly, the US is way behind again when it comes to mobile technology.

We've had portable numbers in the UK market since the 1st of Jan 1999. See some of the links on Oftel's website (our government telecommunications regulator).

The US cell phone market is uncompetitive in that it's not possible to take your existing handset and number to another network.

The land line network provides cheap local calls but seems to more than make up for it with high subscription fees and high long-distance charges (depending on provider and package). For comparison, here in the UK I can get phone service for £9.50/month with call charges of 1-3p/min ($15/month, 1.5-5 cents/min) with no local/national distinction. BT has a Light User Scheme with a subscription charge of as little as £11.30/quarter (I think) - this is probably mandated by the regulator, Oftel. I can call the US and much of Europe for 3-5p/min through a separate pre-paid service with no subscription charge. It seems like the US system works nicely for very heavy users but not light users.

I worked as an assistant rf engineer for a wireless ISP for about a year and apparently bandwidth does matter. When writing and refining the business plan we discovered that in order to advertise as broadband (also "high speed") the minimum offered service has to provide 200 kbps at least one way. This is defined in the FCC's Section 706 advanced service inquiry in their second report. The UK I couldn't comment on but you can look here.

I'm not sure why the guy fought it, wasted money. I would've just put "fast" or since they're electrical impulses "lightning fast" or even "three times the speed of dialup!" in the adds.

The way the rules written, one could provide 128 down 200 up, still advertise broadband or high speed, and extend their bandwidth budget a bit. Though I'm betting there would be a test case before too long.

'Broadband' is used in this brief to refer to higher bandwidth, always-on services, offering data rates of 128 kbps and above.

This definition of broadband is used by Oftel for the purposes of measuring take-up in order to capture the dynamic range of services available to residential and business consumers that are classed by the industry as broadband. This definition gives Oftel data that is comparable with broadband take-up figures published by other countries in Europe. For the purposes of specific market assessment and definitions of regulatory obligations, different definitions may be appropriate.

Are you sure? In the UK we only have the right to transfer numbers between mobile phone operators. It would be against the UK numbering scheme to transfer numbers between land and mobile operators - all mobile numbers must be of the form 07xxx xxxxxx. See OFTEL for details, although their site is awful!

My company changed 300 cell phones from one provider to another - keeping the old numbers - worked just great.

Also to do this on your personal number cost around UKP20 =US$30 or so.

Some information Here and Here

I know other European and Asia Pac countries have the same sort of agreements in place.

The Radio Authority licenses commercial radio broadcasts in the UK.
The Radiocommuniactions Agency is "responsible for the management of the non-military radio spectrum in the UK."
At some point this year both jobs are due to be taken over by the new OFCOM, which will also take on the roles currently performed by OFTEL, the Broadcasting Standards Commission, and the Independent Television Commission (see their sites for what they do.)

I didn't realise that 03 had already been designated as geographic. I thought it was just reserved. Good to see a comprehensive list anyway - I remember seeing a very old version of this list once back when phone numbers were simple.

Interestingly, I notice that there aren't any Birmingham 0121 8xx or 0121 9xx numbers, so I wonder how long it'll be before Birmingham numbers migrate to 0121 8xxx yyyy and so that can be renumbered 024 8xxx yyyy. That'd be good.

I found another page that looks pretty interesting too.

Being able to move to a different network and keep the same number is a benefit, as it lets you move to a better tariff if there's a better one available, without having to change your number. As for the disadvantages, Oftel have an entry in their faq about this (only applies to the uk, I assume.)

Basically, from a landline, calls will be charged at the rate for the origonal network, not the network the number has been ported to. For calls from a mobile, the charge will be according to current network. They (Oftel) don't see any reason why charging for mobile to mobile calls needs to change ("Although some charges may be more than anticipated, callers my also be pleasantly surprised when an assumed off-net call is charged at an on-net tariff.")

Who calls land lines anymore if they can avoid it?
Me. Because, unless I'm calling someone else on Orange, landlines are cheeper to call (free, if I haven't used all my inclusive minutes for the month yet.)

uh well they're a monopoly, and they're getting worse, and those useless fucks at oftel who are supposed to monitor them do sodall, and the government allows it all to happen. So what would you call it exactly?

That isn't so - we've got loads of regulators for utility companies. The relevant one here is Oftel. It's just that they are reluctant to bitchslap the utils.

Based upon the approximate order of the figures at this link . Just over 1%, which contrasts to about the 22% of the UK population, acording to OFTEL (boo hiss)

I have just sent the following communications to BT and Oftel:

To BT I wrote:

I am very unimpressed with the severe limitations placed on the ADSL service BT is offering.

I was very much looking forward to hosting my own web server, but it appears that not only is this impossible under the current service offering, I will also be unable to use my own SMTP server or any kind of server at all.

I know from ADSL users in the US that this is not due to any technical limitations imposed by necessity but is simply due to a policy decision by BT to limit the service in this way. It seems more than likely that BT intends to force users to pay for a web hosting service when this is not really necessary for any technical or practical reasons.

I feel that this is yet another clear example of BT leveraging their monopoly over the local loop in an improper way. I will be therefore also be contacting Oftel to request that they either remove this monopoly or force you to stop forcing Network Address Translation on ADSL users and allow us to run our own server software.

BT's new ADSL service has been deliberately designed with unnecessary limitations which damage the value proposition for end users.

The worst of these is that it is not possible for users to run any sort of server software. There is no technical reason why this should be so, but they have inserted a layer of Network Address Translation (NAT) between the users and the internet which prevents servers from being accessible from the outside world.

I have no doubt that BT seeks to force their users to pay for web hosting services etc. in the expectation that they will get some of the business. I am utterly incensed by this; it is yet another clear example of BT cynically abusing its monoply over the local loop. The customers yet again find themselves robbed of any alternative.

Please note that in other countries such as the Netherlands and the US where ADSL has been available for some time, customers are indeed able to run their own servers as a part of the standard service.

I am therefore requesting, in the strongest possible terms, that OFTEL immediately takes one of the following two actions:

i) to force BT to remove the NAT which is hiding the servers in my ADSL connection

ii) to remove BT's monopoly on the local loop forthwith, i.e. not to wait until next year.

As I implied there are other problems with BT's ADSL offering but the NAT restriction is plainly intolerable. BT continues to take advantage of their monopoly by refusing to provide the full service available in overseas telecoms markets which have been fully privatised.

I look forward to an early reply.

Suitable online complaint forms can be found here at BT and here at OFTEL.

Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction

Although BT was privatized ages ago, there is a government committee/organisation/bureaucracy thing called "oftel" which keeps an eye on them (and the rest of the UK telecoms industry) with regard to anti-competitive actions/quality of service issues/etc. See here if you really want to.

1. BT is regulated by OFTEL, so in answer to an AC, it is still under government regulation.

2. Oftel have given a generous amount of time to BT before it needs to unbindle the local loop

3. In this time, BT wil seek to tie in as many users to its pitiful services as possible - this (my view) is they ADSL is being lauched now.

4. ISDN in the UK was *not* promoted for about the first ten years of its life. Its only in the last couple of years that BT have pushed it. Why? I guess because there is little or no advantage to BT in users using ISDN.

5. Less than 6 months ago, Iain Vallance, the BT Chairperson, said stuff like "the internet is too immature a technology for UK business ... BT is acting as a lollypop man (person who helps schoolkids across the street) trying to save businesses from themselves".

6. ADSL rollout *might* reach 70% of the population by the end of 2002.

7. Why so slow?

8. To protect leased line connection charges - e.g. we pay circa $40,000 for an E-1 (2mbps) line, and are quoted $8,000 for a (wait for it) 64k line. If we can get 512k for $4,000 under ADSL, the scale of potential revenue loss to BT (profits of more than $1.4 billion per annum from a population of 58 million souls) is large.

9. Bottom line; BT is doing the *least* it can to increase offerings, the *most* it can to preserve its monopoly position.

The document says that local loop ADSL competition and radio spectrum broadband access will start in 2001, NOT be rolled out nationwide by 2001.

In fact, it's even worse than that. Paragraph 5.2 says that Oftel will rely on competition to drive high bandwidth services into rural areas. Whilst this worked very nicely for GSM digital mobile phones, just see what happened to cable TV- virtually unknown outside towns (just try doing TCP/IP on a satellite dish- very expensive and useless for uploading- and that's presuming you don't live in an area when dishes are banned, as they are in so many rural areas!).

Plus, there is no recommendation that BT should be mandated to supply even their existing medium bandwidth services such as Home Highway ISDN to rural users (not available more than 2 miles from the exchange- I live only 500 metres from the exchange but the copper wire takes a 3 mile detour!)

In short, rural areas have yet again been sold down the river. What annoys me is that it is rural residents that need this bandwidth the most. Oftel is a regulatory body and should be looking after needs, not profit. Why would townsfolk want cable TV, teleshopping, multi-user chatlines and home offices when the video shop, supermarket, pub and place of work are on their doorstep? These amenities are often not available to rural users where not only remote location, but sheer lack of numbers, make even subsidised facilities uneconomic.

The official consultation period has ended, but once you have read the document you can still send your opinions to:

Ms Sally Trebble,
Consultation on Access to Bandwidth,
OFTEL,
50, Ludgate Hill,
London.
EC4M 7JJ
or email netcomp.oftel@gtnet.gov.uk
or fax 0171 634 8924

--