Ofcom has just published a statement regarding the charges that Communications Providers apply for calls to 0870 numbers.  This has been in the pipeline and in the news off and on for what seems like a couple of years and is in response to complaints that the public did not know that 0870 numbers were more expensive to call than 01,02,03 geographic numbers.

This will mean that calling the TV Licensing Authority to tell them you don’t have a TV should no longer cost as much as the license fee (depending in all fairness on how long you are on hold but the concept is a good one).

Reality is that businesses build in the revenue shares they get from using 0870 numbers into their business model.  The enforced reduction in pricing will undoubtedly bring “transparency”, as Ofcom likes to call it, into the game but industry will still need to recover the costs, notionally by charging more elsewhere.

The new Ofcom rules come into force on 1st August. The statement can be read here.