On the 1st of July Ofcom introduced a highly significant change to the way we get charged for making certain telephone calls.
All calls to service numbers (that’s any number beginning with 084, 087, 09 or 118) are now charged differently: There’s an access charge (set by the network provider) and a service charge (set by the company you’re calling). More on service charges
O2 are set to bump up their access charge after initially setting it at 25 pence per minute. The new charge of 45 pence will come into effect on the 17th of August, and brings O2 closer to its competitors. When the new charging system was introduced by Ofcom, networks were given the freedom to set their access charge on a provided range, hence the variation in access charges seen between major UK networks. But as competing networks have revealed their charges, it seems some have been left tempted to adjust things.
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