No more fruit salad?

An astute follower, Downbytheriverside, has pointed out that my already rather weary fruit analogy for call termination between BT and other fixed networks might be stretched a little further…..

In its September consultation on ‘Fair and reasonable charges for fixed geographic call termination’, Ofcom again tackled the question of what ‘reciprocity’ should actually mean in practice.  The nub of the problem, as Ofcom explains, is that call termination on non-BT networks has been seen as a different beast because of ‘the larger area typically covered by a local switch in BT’s competitors’ networks relative to the area typically covered by a local exchange in BT’s network’. On that basis, non-BT termination charges should lie somewhere between BT’s single tandem and local exchange rates – and the old ‘reciprocity’ agreement offered one method of deriving that blend (although not a very good one).  Put another way, a banana ought to cost more than a kiwifruit but less than a pineapple.  But maybe not in Ofcom’s eyes…

Having looked at several charging options, Ofcom delivers the killer blow thus:

We have reviewed this position and question whether such a blended approach continues to be appropriate. While it may be true that a local switch in BT’s competitors’ networks often covers a greater geographic area than a typical BT DLE, in the current environment of diverse technologies and multiplicity of networks this is not necessarily a reliable indicator either of the actual costs of terminating a call in the network in question or that such costs are necessarily efficiently incurred.

So that’s it.  Forget the underlying differences: in future, for bananas, read kiwis.