LONDON (AP)-Three British telephone companies charge customers too much to place calls to mobile phones, a regulator said Thursday as he ordered a monopoly investigation of their pricing.
“Mobile phones are an increasingly important part of everyday life,” said Don Cruickshank, Britain’s director general of telecommunications. “They are no longer expensive toys for the few, but the cost of calling them is very high.”
Cruickshank said mobile phone operators Vodafone Group plc and Cellnet charge British Telecommunications plc too high a fee for calls that get onto their networks, and British Telecommunications is “adding too much on top of that” when it bills its customers.
The phone companies pointed out that prices have been coming down and questioned whether an investigation is necessary.
Since regulators began looking into the issue a year-and-a-half ago, the price of a daytime call from a regular telephone to a mobile phone has fallen by 14.7 percent to about 53 cents a minute.
But Cruickshank said consumers should only be paying about 33 cents a minute, and he ordered a full investigation by Britain’s Monopolies and Mergers Commission.
British Telecommunications said it has no control over the prices it has to pay the mobile telephone operators and that it seemed “unusual, if not unprecedented” for the regulators to order a monopoly investigation without first seeking to address the issue by getting the companies to change their licensing agreements.
Vodafone’s chief executive, Chris Gent, said consumers were benefiting from competition and that an investigation was not needed.
The regulator could have imposed price controls, but Cruickshank said he wanted a full review of the matter before making any decisions.
