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Ofcom Strategic Review
In the summer of 2005 Ofcom carried out a full Strategic Review of the use of NTS.
During this review Ofcom recognised that NTS has helped to develop a large number of useful services now available to UK customers. However, the review also raised a number of consumer concerns relating to whether NTS calls currently represent good value for money and the difficulties customers have in finding out how much these calls cost before making them.
A summary of the main consumer concerns highlighted by the review follows:
- NTS calls cost more than equivalent geographic calls because they do not offer the same discounts or they are not included in operators’ pricing packages.
- It’s hard to find out how much NTS calls actually cost until they appear on the phone bill.
- The way service providers advertise the price of calls to their services (such as ‘local rate’ or ‘national rate’) can be misleading.
- Many customers feel that operators should not be able to share their income for handling NTS calls with NTS service providers. Some customers also feel that call centres try to earn money by deliberately keeping them in queues for long periods.
- An increasing number of organisations, including government departments and important services such as GP surgeries, are switching from using geographic to NTS numbers.
- The growing use of NTS numbers (mainly 0871) for adult and similar services, which are not as easily barred as 09 premium-rate numbers. (Barring means that the network prevents any calls being made to those numbers.)
After considering these concerns, in the summer of 2006 Ofcom announced a number of changes to how NTS will work in the future.
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