5 years ago… Oftel slams Cable & Wireless on billing U-turn

03.09.1999 Oftel has warned Cable & Wireless Communications not to raise charges for its domestic customers after the UK telco tried to hoist a £10 monthly charge on Videotron cable customers making free local calls to businesses.

Residential cable company Videotron had offered its customers free local phone calls, prompting many subscribers to use the service to dial their ISPs. CWC consequently demanded a £10 monthly charge for all calls made to business numbers.

A spokesman for CWC said: "It was a small number of customers who spent their life on the internet who were being subsidised by other subscribers. We sent out letters warning them but some did not get them in time."

For the full story see this page.

03.09.2004 This may seem like a small-time story but five years ago the case of Videotron customers - and more broadly unmetered telecoms - was a big deal.

The Campaign for Unmetered Telecoms, CUT, made a noise about this case but broadly campaigned for telcos, mainly BT, to take the same plunge that others around the world had and offer all-you-can-eat local call deals.

The idea is that such pricing would allow greater use of dial-up ISPs for internet access.

Of course, the telcos at that stage ran scared. Who would pass up all those extra chargeable minutes from online time?

Eventually the average punter was offered 'unlimited' dial-up packages, for net access, and now that debate has moved on as more and more home users subscribe to broadband.

However, it's interesting to note recent campaigns by some - especially those in the industry (one vendor refers to 'broadband communism') - who see no reason why there should be unlimited downloading now. So consumers have the pleasure of broadband packages with monthly limits.

Maybe the debate hasn't moved on that much after all.