The Mercury One-2-One Personal Communications Network arm of Mercury Communications Ltd has now set the tariffs for its imminent service, which is to be launched within weeks. There are to be two types of service, BusinessCall for heavier users, and PersonalCall for infrequent users, and two charge bands, standard rate and economy rate. Confusingly, timings for these charge bands differ between services: standard rate hours for BusinessCall users are to be 7am to 9pm Monday to Saturday, while for PersonalCall users the standard rate covers 7am to 7pm Monday to Friday only. Call charges have been set at 16p per minute standard rate and 8p per minute cheap rate for BusinessCall, and 25p and 10p per minute for PersonalCall. The initial connection for either service is to be UKP20, with monthly subscriptions of UKP20 (BusinessCall) and UKP12.50 (PersonalCall). Inbound calls for each service are to cost 15.3p (peak rate), 11.2p (standard rate), and 7.2p off-peak. Finally, calls between One-2-One phones are to cost 8p per minute for BusinessCall subscribers, with PersonalCall users paying the standard tariffs. Service coverage will be within the area bounded by the M25 motorway around London initially, with a roll-out across the south east of England by the middle of next year – it hopes to have 90% of the UK population covered by the end of the decade.
Call barring
The standard service package is to include itemised billing, call barring, call waiting and call divert. A voice mail facility is also to be included, with calls to retrieve messages charged at the regular tariffs. Mercury has also attempted to respond to users’ concerns about the amount they are spending with Call Check, a feature that will enable them to call in to check spending so far in that month. Tied in with this is an optional Call Limit feature, by which subscribers are informed when they have reached their chosen limit. Finally, and as reported previously, the embedded chip Smart Card technology incorporated into the system enables users to share their handsets, with calls billed to the person actually making the call.
