Yesterday, BT and 3 UK joined forces with a number of other organisations and launched a new campaign; Terminate the Rate.  This campaign (along with the website) is aimed at putting pressure on OfCom to reduce the MTR (Mobile Termination Rate), which currently stands at 4.7p per minute.

What does that actually mean.  Well, when you make a call from your  BT Landline to a mobile network, the mobile network charges BT 4.7p per minute to accept that call, and hence BT have to pass that onto you as a higher cost to call mobiles.  However, it also means that if you ring from, say, O2 to Orange, Orange will charge O2 4.7p per minute, again, keeping the cost of cross-network calls artificially high.

Artificial you say? Yes, it actually only costs the mobile networks around 1p per minute to handle that call.  This is resulting in charges of £750 million per year in MTR, which you and I, as consumers, are ultimately paying. To give you a comparison, BT currently charge 0.3p per minute to handle a call on their landline network.

Well, BT and 3 UK have joined forces with the National Union of Students, Moneysupermarket.com, Carers UK, and the GMB (Britain’s General Trade Union) to “help influence” the level of the MTRs that are due for a review soon (the new rate will come into effect in 2011).

Historically, 3 UK were allowed a higher MTR as a newcomer into the market to allow them to operate in a fairer marketplace, but even so, they are still paying out £25m each year.

We support this campaign too; 3 UK had hinted that without this high level of MTR they could potentially offer unlimited landline and unlimited texts for a monthly fee of £35 (although let’s also remind ourselves of the Not Unlimited campaign to ensure transparency in promotions like this).

Please feel free to head over to the Terminate the Rate website and sign the petition; the end result of fairer MTR payments is better value for money for us the consumer.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 21st, 2009 at 9:55 am and is filed under Gadgets, Not Unlimited. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.