General’s orders and the poor bloody infantry

There seems to be an awful lot of top level activity going on at the moment. This month Timico bought one of our competitors Coms, that was in trouble, and TalkTalk bought Tipicall, which was not. And of course we have the mergers of O2 and Three and Everything Everywhere with BT to pick over.

On top of this Ofcom is gearing up for their forthcoming Strategic Review – a helicopter view of the entire industry that’s likely to be a big distraction for all of us at some point.

All this corporate big-boy activity seems a bit surreal as we grapple with the itty-bitty details of Ofcom’s orders to change to 08xx number pricing that come into operation in July. It’s a lot of work for a dubious outcome.

If you missed it, it’s discussed here:
https://www.voipfoneblog.co.uk/?p=1146

One shock result of this was that making 0800 free to caller doesn’t make it free to telcos – we now get charged even more for receiving the call and delivering it to our customers. (If you have an 0800 number from us, don’t worry, we’ve decided to keep the price as it was.)

It’s not so easy for 0870 numbers though, Ofcom’s changes mean that we’ll have to take them out of our packages as some of them are once again likely to be very expensive to call. One of Ofcom’s more bizarre decisions – and there’s a lot to choose from.