I wasn’t much of a fan of the Channel4 documentary last week, ‘the great mobile phone rip-off’. Neither were many of the readers here at SMS Text News — much of the coverage was either irrelevant (would have been useful 2-3 years ago) or not really a problem any more. However the one thing I do have a bit of an issue with is termination fees — the charge one mobile provider makes to another to connect a call to one of its subscribers. In some cases they’re abnormally high — 3UK, for example, is at the wrong end of the charging stick, because it has markedly lower subscriber numbers, it — obviously — ends up paying out more to the other mobile companies. Is it fair? Well. Depends on your view. Are termination fees too high? On balance, I think so. But then… 2.5bn a year in combined revenues for the mobile operators (so reports the Dispatches documentary), that’s a big hole to cover in next year’s accounts if fees are lowered, disbanded or changed.
Here’s a Youtube of the termination fees section from the broadcast last week featuring Steve Weller from Uswitch.