Monitoring News
Every month our Managing Director, Steve Kimber, fills us in on the latest monitoring news.
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Below is an archive of the previous year's monthly columns or click here for earlier news columns.
| March 12 | February 12 | January 12 |
| December 11 | November 11 | October 11 |
| September 11 | August 11 | July 11 |
| June 11 | May 11 | April 11 |
Connections
August 2009
Hello Again,
As of this month the new tariffs for 0870 signalling have been implemented by the telecom network providers as a result of OFCOM’s recommendations.
For those ARC’s who used 0870 and took a revenue share of the incoming call, either data or voice, there is now no longer the opportunities of enjoying that revenue share. In fact the network providers are now charging the owners of 0870 number ranges for the privilege of receiving calls.
Most ARC’s have used 0870 non geographic numbers as a means to maintain service under contingency conditions and many also used the old premium rate numbers such as 0891 and 09 ranges of numbers arguably to make a profit from false alarms. So as you can imagine, the recent developments have had a major impact on some ARC’s and a lesser impact on those who did not receive revenue share from such numbering structures.
At SMS & NMS we similarly have been affected, only by the fact we now have increased costs within the business for receiving calls via 0870. Being certificated for high integrity monitoring providing for no interruption to service, non geographic numbers are important to us as it protects the ARC’s from exchange failure either at Portsmouth or Manchester for both data and voice calls.
We consciously made the decision not to force our customers to undertake chip changes in an effort to reduce cost to our business by ring fencing, some while ago, 0870 and moving to 0844 for data in an attempt to reduce the impact.
This still leaves the question of 0870 voice lines, the incoming charges for which will incur us in the largest cost increase, however at this stage we have also decided to leave our voice platform on 0870 with view to reviewing the position in the New Year. In the meanwhile the underlying numbers of 02392 265113 for SMS and 0161 927 3990 for NMS can always be used to contact us.
For those who are being invited by their ARC to re-chip their communicators, now’s the time to see what we have to offer in services, prices and incentives whilst also taking stock of the BT21CN solutions we have to offer.
Bye for now,
Steve