Communications regulatorOfcomis making headway to stamp out abuses and ensure consumers
enjoy lower costs and more choice from the switch to digital
technology, itsthird annual reportreports.
CEO Ed Richards said, "With change comes complexity, and with
complexity comes the increased potential for business practices
that harm consumers and other forms of abuse."
Richards said the cost of a typical "basket" of residential
communications services, such as telephone, television, radio and
internet, had fallen by one-third over four years. Overall customer
satisfaction remained high, between 88% and 93%, it said.
The abuses Ofcom has tackled in the past 12 months include
silent marketing calls slamming, where a customer is moved from one
telecoms provider to another without their consent complaints of
racial abuse against Channel 4's Big Brother premium-rate telephone
abuses, typically by TV quiz programmes and food advertisements
aimed at children.
Richards said business activity that depends on the
radio spectrum contributes £37bn, or 3%, to the UK GDP. The
economic impact of spectrum use has increased by 50% in just over
three years. Key to this was to permit new suppliers, products and
services to create a competitive market.
Ofcom said some 2m telephone lines had been unbundled by March
2007. This year, the UK overtook the US in broadband availability
and is now just behind Canada in terms of broadband availability in
G7 countries. Average headline connection speeds in the UK are now
faster than 3.8 Mbit/s, it said.
"At the end of March 2007 more than half of UK adults had
broadband at home, a seven-fold increase over the last four years,"
Richards said.
Ofcom dropped its price control over BT last year because more
than 10.7 million UK households and small businesses use a telecoms
provider other than BT, and mobile phone penetration at home is on
a par with fixed lines.
"The same number of UK households now has a mobile phone as a
landline and for the first time, the proportion of households
relying on mobile phones exclusively (10%) is the same as the
proportion who only use landline phones," Richards said.
Ofcom is now addressing termination charges for calls between
fixed and mobile networks, as well as - under pressure from the
European Union - mobile roaming changes.
"We expect that this will lead to an annual reduction in
wholesale charges of £400m to £500m over four years savings which
we expect to be passed on to retail customers," he said.
Ofcom found nearly 80% of UK television households view digital
television. But it warned that the switch to digital was
fragmenting the market, making it harder and more expensive for
broadcasters to deliver profitable audiences.