It has been mentioned to me that BT are going to remove the Light User Scheme (LUS) and In-Contact Plus (ICR).  They will be replaced by BT Basic, as follows:-

BT Basic

You can only be on it if you have one of the following 3 benefits:-
1) Job Seekers Allowance
2) Income Support
3) Guaranteed State Pension

Receipt of the above will have to be proved.

The cost is £14.49 a quarter (minus £3 if paid via D/D) and includes 45 mins of calls a quarter. Calls over the 45 mins are at 10p/min any time of the day or night.

This is coming into play in January sometime but people will be able to keep the old tariffs for a while as they are migrated over.

The main reason for this I assume is to limit the number of people who can go on this loss-making tariff which BT are forced to continue.

Mentioned on MSE here.

I presume it will still have the same restrictions as the Light User Scheme, i.e. the customer is not eligible if he/she has any "broadband" or any mobile phone or anyone else in the house has another telephone line.

I think your find its a new stand alone product,and the other 2 will still run.

They probaly pinched the idea from Kingston Communications (Hull) , who already run a similar package.

http://www.kingstoncommunications.co.uk/regulatory/_docs/KC_conditionsofservice_10_06.pdf

See 12 of 20 . Social Access Package.

acezing wrote on Jan 1^st, 2007 at 9:50am:

I think your find its a new stand alone product,and the other 2 will still run.

Nope, it is replacing the LUS and ICP totally. People will be slowly transfered over.
And yeah, the same restrictions apply as the LUS: no mobile, no BB, no prefix codes, no CPS ect.

Ofcom mention the new scheme here,but dont indicate it will replace the other two. Have BT told them?

http://www.ofcom.org.uk/consumeradvice/landline/residential/choosing/lowcost/

Yep, at least according to the training we got on it last week. ;)

For anyone interested the way people will get on this tariff is by contacting a special team who will send out a form for you to fill in, the form is sent back to us and we will be contacting the DWP to ensure its accurate before OKing the BT Basic.

How are BT going to find out about your broadband rental or mobile ownership?
Surely they can't make you tell them as it is personal info, and if they investigated via the various suppliers their enquiries should be met with the Data Protection wall.
You would then use the voip callback service.

And how the heck did DWP get the right to give out our info freely? Can I ring them to ask if my potential customer can afford my services before I offer them?

Supposing you were in a shared house, but without permission to use the other tenant's phone / computer / other equipment. How would you stand then?

I honestly dont know the answer to any of your questions. Im just a phone monkey who agrees with a lot of what is said on this forum. :P

a very nice man wrote on Jan 10^th, 2007 at 6:11pm:

How are BT going to find out about your broadband rental or mobile ownership?

They can't find out about you owning a Pay As You Go mobile in any practical terms, especially if you haven't registered it as you are legally allowed not to.  Also anyone who is JobSeeking is never going to get a bloody job these days if they don't have broadband and a computer - what a farce.

Knowing you have got broadband on the line is easy as long as BT are allowed to get access to BT OpenReach's records of which lines are tagged for BT Wholesale broadband or LLU broadband.  Also given what good friends BT has at Ofcom and how anti privacy protection New Labour in general are no doubt they have or will be allowed such access.

The outrage is that for gas and electricity if you have a cottage in Snowdonia that is only occupied 20 days a year then loads of gas and electricity companies have a no standing charge tariff that makes no stipulations at all about who you are or your income.

It is outrageous that BT Wholesale, who have a de facto monopoly in rural areas on line rental because they either sell to you via BT or via another company they sell the WLR line to, are not forced to come up with a product for people who do not make phone calls and only need the line for broadband and Voip.  Instead we are forced to subsidise lower cost prices for BT Option 2 and Option 3 customers with our outraegous £33 a quarter BT No Option 1 line rental for maintaining a years old copper wire and line card.

However I don't have BT, I have TW for the net. I'm sure their database is Data controlled.
If I pull the wire from the wall when / if they come, where's the evidence?

Just had a quick think about the phone access I've got in the house.
BT - For incoming, Voip callback & dial thru
Orange - Me
T-Mobile Hungary - The Bird
Tesco P A Y G  - The Bird while she's here
O2 - Me, the call diversion box
Voipcheap
Voipstunt
Skype

I think I might not qualify after all!

a very nice man wrote on Jan 14^th, 2007 at 9:53pm:

However I don't have BT, I have TW for the net. I'm sure their database is Data controlled. If I pull the wire from the wall when / if they come, where's the evidence? Just had a quick think about the phone access I've got in the house. BT - For incoming, Voip callback & dial thru Orange - Me T-Mobile Hungary - The Bird Tesco P A Y G  - The Bird while she's here O2 - Me, the call diversion box Voipcheap Voipstunt Skype I think I might not qualify after all!

I think the point is they require you to sign a statement saying you don't have broadband access.

If you aren't with BT chances are they won't catch you but you could always talk about it at the pub and then a friend who has a grudge against you may tip the off BT's Investigations department.  And they are probably going to take out one or two example prosecutions against well off techno geeks like you who are well outside the profile they had in mind for helping the technologically illiterate and impoverished (you seem to have to be both to qualify for this scheme).

So BT come out with a new scheme for poor people and it still assumes having broadband isn't essential for the poor - now how does that stop social exclusion? :-/ :o :'(

NGMsGhost wrote on Jan 14^th, 2007 at 9:00pm:

It is outrageous that BT Wholesale, who have a de facto monopoly in rural areas on line rental because they either sell to you via BT or via another company they sell the WLR line to, are not forced to come up with a product for people who do not make phone calls and only need the line for broadband and Voip.  Instead we are forced to subsidise lower cost prices for BT Option 2 and Option 3 customers with our outraegous £33 a quarter BT No Option 1 line rental for maintaining a years old copper wire and line card.

There actually is such a tariff available - but its similar to what BT Retail charges its Option 1 customers in line rental, so very few companies offer it.

Believe me, you are not subsidising BT's Option 2 and Option 3 customers - they are profitable on their own..

Regards
Sunil

gt94sss2 wrote on Jan 16^th, 2007 at 3:56am:

There actually is such a tariff available - but its similar to what BT Retail charges its Option 1 customers in line rental, so very few companies offer it.

Please do tell me what that tariff is and provide a URL to it.


Quote:

Believe me, you are not subsidising BT's Option 2 and Option 3 customers - they are profitable on their own.

Let me put it another way.  BT Option 1 customers are charged violently over the odds so as to blackmail us into routing all our calls with BT on Options 2 and 3 instead where the price differential to Option 1 is now much smaller.  Since BT is still the massively dominant market player how can Ofcom justify a situation where BT now finds it much easier to talk more customers into not leaving it.

Also how does BT justify the poor who use computers having to pay a whopping £132 a year to BT just so they then have a line that can take a broadband connection with further fees on top?  There is no competition to BT Wholesale/Openreach outside of cable and fully LLU exchange phone areas.

NGMsGhost wrote on Jan 16^th, 2007 at 9:54am:

Quote: Believe me, you are not subsidising BT's Option 2 and Option 3 customers - they are profitable on their own. Let me put it another way.  BT Option 1 customers are charged violently over the odds so as to blackmail us into routing all our calls with BT on Options 2 and 3 instead where the price differential to Option 1 is now much smaller.

Now I dont know much on the technical side of things, but dont you need to have a line to get Broadband? And if the lines cost roughly £9 per person per line then charging an extra £2 pcm hardly seems shockingly unfair, remember this is a buisness after all.
If my numbers are wrong I apologise, Im just going from what I have picked up.

darkstar wrote on Jan 16^th, 2007 at 10:55am:

Now I dont know much on the technical side of things, but dont you need to have a line to get Broadband? And if the lines cost roughly £9 per person per line then charging an extra £2 pcm hardly seems shockingly unfair, remember this is a buisness after all. If my numbers are wrong I apologise, Im just going from what I have picked up.

If I only need the line maintained for broadband use then why do I have to pay towards subsidising the cost of calls on a BT call package (BT Option 1) at a lower level than their cost effective market rate for those calls.  There used to be something called BT Standard that only cost £8.50 per month and also came with over £2 a month of call allowance that was abolished on 1st July 2004.

Now we have to subscribe to one of BT's discount call packages to have broadband, even if we don't want to make any calls with BT. How is that fair.

So as line rental is now £11 per month then even allowing for inflation over 2 years we are paying £4 per month extra (factoring in the lost free monthly call allowance on BT Standard) if we only need broadband to prop up the discounting of calls on the BT Option schemes.

Still not answering my question though.

WHY should a buisness only charge the wholesale price to supply you with a service? I wouldnt expect my local ASDA to charge me wholesale price for my beans or potatoes. Why should BT have to?
I honestly think that expecting them to sell things and not make a profit is a stupid expectation from you.
Its NOT subsidy, its a company making a profit. :-/

darkstar wrote on Jan 16^th, 2007 at 11:12pm:

Still not answering my question though. WHY should a buisness only charge the wholesale price to supply you with a service? I wouldnt expect my local ASDA to charge me wholesale price for my beans or potatoes. Why should BT have to? I honestly think that expecting them to sell things and not make a profit is a stupid expectation from you. Its NOT subsidy, its a company making a profit. :-/

Why should BT levy £33 per quarter on its miserable 20 year old copper wire while the gas, electricity and water companies only levy £5 to £10 per quarter standing charge.  Those big electricity pylons and electricity sub stations and water mains and reservoirs all look more expensive to me to maintain than a few phone switches and light guage overhead copper cables that don't electrocute anybody or get contaminated like water does.

What BT charges for line rental is all based on a quite fictitious valuation of its ancient copper wire network which the fools at Ofcom allowed.  That copper network won't be worth anything once WiMax gets going properly in two or three years time.

BT has a monopoly on rural phone networks.  Why should it be able to levy exorbitant charges to maintain its inefficient and overmanned staffing structure with old technology that could have been modernised and replaced with far less manpower intensive systems of maintenance years ago.

If I had a choice other than using BT Wholesale/OpenReach's service then your argument that I could shop around might hold.  But I have to prop up BT to get a broadband service.

When did I argue about shopping around?

All I know is the prices that have been said on here as far as the wholesale side of lines goes, and that was £9 pcm. Why is it so hard to think that maybe it costs more to upkeep an above ground system that is vunerable to even a bit of wind than to an underground piping system? I am honestly not having a pop or trying to argue, I just really cant see why its so unfeasable. After all the 'experts' are Ofcom, not yo. So how can YOU decide what prices are fictitious?
So if the experts say its that price why shouldnt BT add a charge to make money? After all, as I have said already time after time, it is a buisness.

PLEASE show me how, I enjoy any change to slate BT (not as much as I do CPW or Southern Electric mind).

Gas and electricity operators all have no standing charge tariffs.  If you only use £5 per quarter gas or electricity standing charge that is all you pay.  And its entitely feasible that remote garages or little used country cottages may only use that per quarter,

Why does BT not have a no standing charge phone tariff when I don't even make phone calls with it.  Becaue OfCon doesn't force it to.

Of course your masters claims it costs them all this money to maintain their network just like Balfour Beatty tried to claim they didn't cause the Hatfield rail crash.  The reality is that phone line rental and broaband charges by BT Wholesale are where the company makes most of its money.  It doesn't make anything to speak of out of 01/02 phone calls I can tell you.

Of course that's why BT pushed 0845/0870 calls so much, which Ofcom in whom you seem to have so much faith but are in fact in the pockets of the telcos, allowed to explode out of control.

NGMsGhost wrote on Jan 17^th, 2007 at 12:02am:

Of course your masters claims it costs them all this money to maintain their network.

Jeez, my masters? Just because I work for BT it doesnt mean I am brainwashed you know. Its why I ask the questions, if I just belived every word you said I would be as much a sheep as the people who belive that pyramid schemes are the future. I can only make a REALISTIC prediction/comment/observation by following what has been said by the people in the know, and sorry but unless you have made the observations and surveyts on telecoms then that doesnt include you. You are an amature with conspiracy theories like those people who belive the moon landings are faked. You ignore anything thats official and decide that because YOU cant see it then its a lie. The facts as we know them is that the price of a line is £9 pcm at a wholesale level, so BT charge £11 pcm at a retail level. Either prove the £9 is a lie, explain why a buisness shouldnt make money or drop the subject as a failure for yourself.
Prove either of the first two I said and I will admit to being wrong VERY happily, belive that!!! :)

We the line rental customers are not paying for the lines that are there now but for BT to invest in its 21st century network to fend off WiMax.  But we the customers should only be paying for the old phone lines we use and BT's shareholders ought to be paying for that investment and taking the risk.

You refer to the Wholesale cost of the phone line as being £9.  That £9 comes from Bt Wholesale another operating division of BT.  The fact that other utilities like water, gas and electricity have far lower standing charges for much the same kind of infrastructure makes it self evident to me that BT Wholesale's wholesale line rentals costs to BT Retail are far above BT Wholesale's actual costs in operating and maintaining the lines.

If you are just going to be rude when you only have a few posts in the forum to your credit then I don't think there's much point in continuing the conversation.  To be honest in your thinking patterns you demonstrate to me that you are a typical call centre worker.  I know the breed all too well - they always refuse to make their own rational deductions from any given set of facts and instead want the deductions to all be fed to them by somebody else just like an on screen call script..........

Rude? How the hell have I been rude? I have asked you to give me some kind of statistic that can back up your point, some shread of evidence that shows you actually know anything about what you are talking about. Its OK to talk about a call script, but if I followed every word you said would I not be doing the same? Is questioning your comments as valid as questioning a companies?
Saying something is self evident is NOT proof or even a valid realistic comment. And as for saying that Water, electric and tepehones use a similer infrostructure (outside of an employment setting) is so funny as to be silly.

And is the £9 not from Ofcoms research? You know, the regulator no matter if you like it or not. As I have said, prove them wrong, show that they and Bt are wrong and I will happily agree with you, dont hide behind 'oh youre a sheep' just because I actually look at evidence thats there rather than just opinions and propaganda. And yes I often question BTs policies and prices, I have a reputation for it in my call center.

So again, the facts as we know them is that the price of a line is £9 pcm at a wholesale level, so BT charge £11 pcm at a retail level. Either prove the £9 is a lie, explain why a buisness shouldnt make money or drop the subject as a failure for yourself rather than just attacking me.

Crap, my apologies for my horrid spelling. I would I was drunk but I just cannot spell. :P

darkstar wrote on Jan 17^th, 2007 at 12:42am:

And is the £9 not from Ofcoms research?

Would that be the same Ofcom contracted research outfit that said most 084/7 call centers answered their calls within only a few seconds ;) ::) :'(

If you take Ofcom as being the fount of all knowledge on telecoms issues you really aren't going to get anywhere in opposing the use of 084/7 numbers.  Ofcom are the root of all our current problems with these scam numbers not being stopped.

I have met your type on the doorstep at elections.  I bet you don't vote for any party at all ever because you can't see what the difference is between any of them.

Would you in Germany in 1944 I wonder have kept asking me to produce the official German government statistics to prove to you that all those people being gassed so horribly I kept talking about were actually being killed.  BT claim the kind of data you want on the cost of maintaining their network is commercially confidential and refuse to release it to the outside world.  How convenient.

No, I actually vote Lib Dem if you must know, but thats by the by.

But again, show me why its NOT £9pcm, give some shred of proof why it doesnt, anything,or  say WHY a company shouldnt make money, or go away. PLEASE do one of the first as you seem to do good stuff on this forum. But knowing about 0845/0870 doesnt make you an expert on all things involved in telecoms. I again have to say that I make my comments based on the evidence in front of me, NOT SPECULATION.

Oh, and ready to drop the personal attacks yet? You may want to check Godwins law as well. ;)

For the record, we can't be sure that it does or doesn't cost BT Openreach £9 pcm to provide/maintain the lines.

I do believe Ofcom have stated that's approx how much it costs BT Openreach and for the record I don't believe anything Ofcom states but we would need more proof and none exists.

We do have to look at the wider picture and that is that BT's equipment is extinct so that prob costs them more to maintain (repair/replace, etc) than modern equipment that BT are currently installing in a few selected areas now.  Remember that BT, or more accurate, BT Openreach, do come out and repair/replace lines, etc for which they're responsible for and this cost is mostly included in our line rental charges except for the few occasions the fault is not their responsibility.

You also have to remember that unfortunate for BT, they can't always recoup this cost through call charges because a lot of people are using CPS or other indirect access providers.  Compare this to the likes of NTL/Telewest where most of their customers are stuck paying NTL/TW's expensive call charges (which are currently the highest for a landline provider) except for those few that use freephone numbers from Call18185, etc.

If you ask me, NTL/TW could prob lower their linerental as they could easily recoup any potential loss (which I doubt there would be) via their call charges but NTL/TW don't do this at all.

No, I'm not happy about paying £10.75 pcm for linerental.

I do think that something needs to be done over those that aren't in a cable area that are stuck paying full linerental and have broadband and use VoIP.  At the very least, BT should be forced to offer the line at maybe the same price as LUS, etc is now but with the all outgoing calls (except 999) blocked but ADSL enabled.  Therefore those using VoIP can do so without paying the full £11 linerental charge and would have to pay VoIP rates for call charges.

Anyone who can only have BT isn't given this choice at all so it's pointless, if you ask me, to use VoIP and still pay full linerental rates.

bbb_uk wrote on Jan 17^th, 2007 at 2:55pm:

We do have to look at the wider picture and that is that BT's equipment is extinct so that prob costs them more to maintain (repair/replace, etc) than modern equipment that BT are currently installing in a few selected areas now.  Remember that BT, or more accurate, BT Openreach, do come out and repair/replace lines, etc for which they're responsible for and this cost is mostly included in our line rental charges except for the few occasions the fault is not their responsibility.

But in the last 10 years I have been here BT have had over £1,000 in line rental from me but have not yet had to fix a single line fault on my phone line as it has never been disconnected.

Compare this with electricity for which I pay just £5 per quarter standing charge and have had to complain about repeated frequent 1 second outages (caused by overhead wires touching trees on their poorly routed overhead lines) on numerous occasions and EDF Energy (and predecessors) have had to spend a lot of money attending to the network to fix this (far more than the £200 or so I have paid in standing charge).  Also last Thursday a tree fell down on one of the local cross country village feeds and they took six and a half hours to reconnect us and had men working till midnight under arc lights in the middle of a field.

If your power is off the network operator usually works 24/7 until the fault is fixed but if your BT line goes down they usually start work in the morning on the next working day which is Tuesday if its the Thursday evening before Easter. >:(

And I also pay BT Wholesale/Openreach again to keep their miserable thin copper wire up to standard and their line card at the exchange maintained as part of my broadband service too.   BT are by far the most expensive utility because they are hideously inefficient and employ large numbers of call centre staff making a mess of administering pointless schemes like Friends & Family which are designed to protect BT jobs while not giving you the discount promised.  They have far too many expensive UK based call jockeys who could be eliminated by an entirely internet based interface with most customers. ;) ;D

The problem is really that the price of call is artificially low because the companies routing the calls do not have to pay the real cost of accessing the network each time which includes maintaining it so the call routes.  Unfortunately this is all collected through flat rate line rental for the phone system which is very unfair to those on lower incomes who do not qualify for the Light User Scheme (that is that almost everybody on low income who is not old doesn't qualify for the Light User Scheme as broadband on the line is incredibly not allowed).  It would seem to me much fairer if people used the phone network a lot paid more to use it as does happen with electricity, gas and water.  The current model for paying for maintenance of the network is a bit mad as it doesn't relate to the amount you use it at all.  And even if I make my calls with 18185 surely BT still get something on each call for being the OCP to 18185s call routing access point?

NGMsGhost wrote on Jan 17^th, 2007 at 3:30pm:

bbb_uk wrote on Jan 17th, 2007 at 2:55pm: We do have to look at the wider picture and that is that BT's equipment is extinct so that prob costs them more to maintain (repair/replace, etc) than modern equipment that BT are currently installing in a few selected areas now.  Remember that BT, or more accurate, BT Openreach, do come out and repair/replace lines, etc for which they're responsible for and this cost is mostly included in our line rental charges except for the few occasions the fault is not their responsibility. But in the last 10 years I have been here BT have had over £1,000 in line rental from me but have not yet had to fix a single line fault on my phone line as it has never been disconnected. If your power is off the network operator usually works 24/7 until the fault is fixed but if your BT line goes down they usually start work in the morning on the next working day which is Tuesday if its the Thursday evening before Easter. >:(

But if you do get fault after fault like some people do then its a godsend, or would you rather everyone paid on a case by case basis? 'A line in your village has gone down, everyone with a phone best pay up to get it reconnected'.

As for the second bit i quoted, I agree it sucks.