Ref: 22/03
Date: 16 April 2003

The Competition Appeal Tribunal has upheld Oftel's decision relating to a complaint by Freeserve that BT was behaving anti-competitively in its broadband marketing activities.

Oftel found that there was no evidence of anti-competitive behaviour by BT following allegations by Freeserve about four aspects of BT's broadband strategy. These allegations were:

• cross marketing between BT and BT Openworld;
• BT Openworld having advance notification of BT Wholesale price reductions;
• predatory pricing by BT in the broadband sector; and
• BT using its telephone census to the benefit of BT Openworld.

David Edmonds, Director General of Telecommunications welcomed the decision today:

"I am delighted that the tribunal has supported Oftel's decision totally in three of the four areas under debate.

"It has agreed that there are no grounds for Freeserves's allegations relating to cross marketing, advance notification and use of the telephone census.

"This decision is a credit to Oftel's robust decision making processes and to the work of Oftel's compliance and in-house legal team.

"In the fourth area of predatory pricing, the tribunal has not commented on whether the reasoning in the original decision was correct, however, Oftel has undertaken to re-examine this aspect of Freeserve's complaint in the light of the tribunal's comments on the detail of the decision."

Notes to editors

Freeserve issued its original complaint about alleged anti-competitive behaviour of BT in connection with broadband marketing activities on 26 March 2002. Oftel closed its investigation into the complaint on 21 May 2002. It concluded that the information supplied by Freeserve did not provide evidence of anti-competitive behaviour.

The case closure summary can be found on the Oftel website at: www.oftel.gov.uk/publications/comp_bull/archive/bull25.htm#btbroadband