British Telecommunications Plc has announced tariff reductions for its 64Kbps international ISDN services, and price cuts for Virtual Private Network customers receiving service from a single exchange. Included in the ISDN price cuts is a change in the pricing structure for services to the US and Canada, and the company says it may introduce this on its other ISDN services as well. Effective from September 29, it has introduced a call set-up fee, and standard and cheap rate time bands for ISDN services to Canada and North America. Initially both time bands – Monday to Friday 8am to 8pm for standard rate, with cheap rate at other times – are being charged at the same rate (UKP1.02 per minute, down from UKP1.40), although the call set-up fee is different. This is to be 54.6 pence standard rate, and 29.4p cheap rate. The company says the aim is to encourage a change in usage patterns: at present usage is concentrated during office hours, and British Telecom hopes that users will shift non-real time applications to other times in order to take advantage of the cheap rate facility. For this reason, it says that it might in the future not only introduce different tariffs for standard and cheap rate, but might also extend this two-tier structure to other international routes. However, since traffic has to be monitored on a monthly basis, it would be at least a year before any new change was introduced. Also effective from September 29, charges per minute for Europe drop to 76p from 85p; the price of services to Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore falls to UKP1.71 per minute from UKP1.98, and charges to Japan go to UKP2.68 from UKP2.84 per minute. Where the offices of BT’s Virtual Private Network customers all fall within a single exchange area, British Telecom says they will now have to pay only a quarterly site charge on the main site, and not the auxilliary ones. These site charges fall between UKP500 and UKP11,250.
