Not fooling around
The sums of money the four big mobile operators charge for transferring calls from their network to another are somewhat misleadingly called ‘mobile termination rates'. Almost a year ago UK telco regulator Ofcom announced it was going to lower the cap on these rates, and it has now revealed they will come in to effect on the anniversary of that announcement - 1 April.
Right now 3 has its mobile termination rates capped at 4.48p per minute, and everyone else has a cap of 4.18p. As of April Fool's Day they will all have to cap their rates at 2.66p per minute. A year after that the cap will be lowered to 1.7p, then 1.08p the year after, culminating in a cap of 0.69p per minute in April 2014.
This looks like pretty good news for consumers, and a rare example of a regulator doing more than merely posturing, but we still wonder what the operators are going to do to recoup this lost revenue. Ofcom observed in its announcement that this cap also affects the cost to landline operators of transferring calls to mobiles too, and it expects these savings to be passed on to consumers.
Observing that mobile data traffic doubled last year, Ofcom opined that mobile termination charges will become a less significant part of operators' revenues over time. We doubt this is much consolation to them. It also said it expects other providers, which we assume means VNOs, to drop their termination rates accordingly.
You can read the full Ofcom statement here.
