Telecommunications campaigners praise OFTEL local loop unbundling
proposals

London, 7 July 1999

For immediate release

Yesterday OFTEL issued 'Access to bandwidth: proposals for action' [1],
its consultation document on unbundling BT's local loop. What OFTEL
proposes would allow organisations other than BT to run telephony and
broadband services over the copper wires between BT telephone exchanges
and homes and businesses.

The Campaign for Unmetered Telecommunications [CUT] strongly supports
OFTEL's stance. We consider the proposals to be more far-reaching than
we expected although not as radical as our own suggestion (Option Zero
[2]) and welcome OFTEL's emphasis on increased competition at the local
loop level, based on justifiable concerns about BT's current control of
its local loop. We find it particularly encouraging that OFTEL has
repeatedly referred to the importance of _affordable unmetered_ access
to the Internet to the future economic development and competitiveness
of the United Kingdom.

We await an early release of BT's deployment and tariffing plans for
ADSL and believe that these will form a significant step towards
facilitating universal unmetered access to the Internet in this country.

That said, we suggest that many families, individuals and small
businesses will not be willing to pay or able to afford the tariff for
ADSL (and other broadband Internet access services), widely trailed as
being £30-£45 per month: whatever the tariff, any ADSL deployment will
take years to complete and may not reach the whole country.

Therefore CUT challenges BT, Cable and Wireless Communications and other
telecommunications operators to offer unrestricted unmetered local
telephone calls as part of their call packages to enable the full
educational and commercial potential of the Internet to be realised by
as many UK users as possible regardless of their income. Kingston
Communications in Hull comes close to this by charging local calls,
including calls to Kingston Communications' own Internet Service
Provider, at 6.5p per call regardless of duration.

Notes for Editors:

1. For the OFTEL 'proposals for action' see:

http://www.oftel.gov.uk/publications/1999/competition/llu0799.htm

2. For 'Option Zero' see:

http://www.unmetered.org.uk/reference/resp_080399.htm

Contact:

Erol Ziya
Press Officer, Campaign for Unmetered Telecommunications
press@unmetered.org.uk

http://www.unmetered.org.uk/

+44 171 681 2831