It’s depressing that it has taken so long to get rid of the iniquitous surcharge for telephone calls made between 8am and 1pm, introduced by British Telecommunications Plc way back in 1970: the surcharge was a classic monopoly response to insufficient capacity to meet peak demand, a why can’t those blasted people make their business phone calls at a time that suits us reaction where installing additional capacity would have been the appropriate commercial response, coupled with imaginative attractions – such as video on demand – to encourage more use of the network at night.
