Former UK telecoms monopoly BT Group will this week announce reduced tariffs for most of its customers following the lifting of price controls by industry regulator Ofcom, the Sunday Telegraph reported.


The paper said BT will unveil a series of cheaper call packages and may also reduce line rental charges. The company is also expected to start heavily promoting its Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service, which enables customers to speak to each other over the internet at a fraction of the cost of a regular call.


The report follows Ofcom's decision last week to scrap price controls on BT's landline calls and line rental that were first imposed in the run-up to the company's privatisation in 1984. The price controls disappear at the end of this month.

It's the standard procedure – new technology allows greater freedom, the long arm of the law gets a sweat on and clamps down. According to today's Guardian, police and intelligence agencies are to ask the government for the power to listen to and identify VoIP (voice over internet protocol) callers.


To be entirely fair, the lobbyists claim that their main concern is VoIP's inability to deliver a 999 service. But the Guardian article quotes a submission to Ofcom, made on 3 May by one detective superintendent Stuart Macleod, outlining the worries of the Data Communications Group – a police and industry liaison body that reports to Acpo (the Association of Chief Police Officers), Revenue and Customs, and Soca (the Serious and Organised Crime Agency), among others:

"At present, law enforcement agencies have great difficulty in tracing the origin of VoIP calls," wrote DS Macleod. "This poses significant threats to our democratic society.

"And it is for this reason that the DCG believes that it must be mandatory for VoIP service providers to be required to retain adequate records in respect of calls made using this technology."

There are echos here of attempts in the US courts to get Google to cough up details of people’s internet searches. We await the outcome with interest.


Source: PC Advisor


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