Comparing costs once again (18 December 2000) Based on what the OECD did earlier this year, OFTEL has released an International Benchmarking Study of mobile telephony and Internet access tariffs. The document is 63 pages long, ten times as long as the OECD contribution, but this is mainly because all raw data is provided, albeit in the form of bar charts. The results are too detailed to summarise - except to note that the United Kingdom generally comes off reasonably well in comparison with the 4 to 6 other countries used as comparison depending on the tests used - but we have a few comments on the methodology. OFTEL has made some improvements on the OECD's techniques: the 'best possible' packages are used for each country, rather than merely those of the 'dominant operator' (presumably BT and BT Openworld in the UK) which rendered the OECD report largely useless; there are far more call patterns ('baskets of calls') than the OECD used; there are investigations into business Internet services and mobile tariffs, both of which the OECD ignored, and mention of future investigations into xDSL and cable modems. However, we note some errors; there is still the mistake of mixing metered and unmetered tariffs rather than treating them separately; 'always on' is still equated to one hundred and fifty hours of metered usage where unmetered services do not exist, rather than simply not bothering; the 'baskets of calls' still imply far too little usage (ten, twenty, thirty or forty hours for residential and business, with a peculiar 'mixed basket' of 9.6 hours, 80 per cent peak, 20 per cent off-peak, for business). OFTEL has kept its report and the OECD report roughly in line: the unfortunate result of that is that almost all of our criticism of the OECD report applies to the OFTEL report as well.