Oftel threatens to intervene on CPS

UK telecoms regulator Oftel has announced that it will intervene if carriers cannot agree on how to implement a service that lets customers use more than one operator.

The watchdog has said that it will set charges for carrier pre-selection (CPS) if operators cannot agree a price among themselves.

CPS allows the automatic re-routing of calls, enabling customers to use more than one operator for local, national and international calls. Currently, users need to dial a prefix or buy an adaptor to re-route calls.

In March this year, Oftel ruled that BT must pay competitors 50 per cent of the cost of providing CPS auto-diallers - the £8 phone boxes that plug into the normal BT socket - after the telco missed the January deadline for upgrading its network.

BT's delay in fully implementing the service, which is important for competition, has become a political minefield.

The European Commission said in June that it will open formal infringement proceedings against the UK for failing to implement the CPS service on time. The European Union (EU) had set 1 January 2000 as the day on which operators in Europe should introduce CPS, but the UK was given an extension until 1 April 2001.

An Oftel spokesman said that the Commission is now satisfied with the watchdog's revised deadline of the end of the year. He added that although the regulator is prepared to lay down conditions, it is confident that an agreement will be reached. "The best deals are those struck between the industry and BT," he said.

In a statement, Oftel said: "Charges relating to the setting up and running of the service need to be in place by the end of the year. Although negotiations between BT and the other operators are proceeding well, Oftel will not hesitate to determine charges if necessary."

Oftel's possible intervention could be seen as a sign that the watchdog, which has come under fire for not being tough enough with BT over the unbundling of the local loop, is finally baring its teeth.

In a separate development, an allocation procedure to decide the order in which operators should be able to install digital subscriber line equipment in BT's exchanges was proposed today by Oftel.