Table of International Accounting Rates - July 1998
International Accounting Rates
1 The Director General last published accounting rates for traffic between the UK and all other countries in December 1996. At that time the only operators licensed to provide international facilities were BT and Mercury (now Cable and Wireless Communications, CWC).
2 On 1 January 1997, the market for the provision of international facilities from the UK was liberalised. There are now more than 60 operators licensed to provide such services.
3 In accordance with the Statement on the Collection and Publication by Oftel of International Call Information (the "Statement") published today, the Director has decided to publish rates once again.
4 The attached table therefore lists rates for International Direct Dial and International ISDN services.
Accounting rates (these are saved as separate htm files as they are large tables)
5 International accounting rates are the traditional basis of the payments made by international telephone operators to each other for the delivery of international calls. The originating operator pays the terminating operator an agreed amount per minute, known as the settlement rate. The accounting rate is the sum of the settlement rate in each direction (usually the same) plus the costs of transit via a third country (if any).
6 This table shows only rates agreed on the bilateral correspondent agreement basis described above. In accordance with the Statement, rates for most operators have not been published for routes which the Director considers to be "liberalised". Since most of the routes for which the new licensees have accounting rate agreements in place are such "liberalised" routes, this means that few of the new licensees' rates have been published. However, BT's rates have been published on all routes.
7 In the case of CWC rates on "liberalised" routes have not been published pending the outcome of the current review of their WEIO status (see the Statement for a definition). Once the review is complete, rates will be published retrospectively for all of CWC's routes on which they are deemed to continue to have WEIO status.
Notes
8 All rates are as of 1 April 1998, except BT whose rates are as at 18 June 1998. They are expressed to two decimal places.
9 Where an operator, in accordance with the accounting rate system, passes traffic to a third party outside the UK for transit to the final destination the route is indicated in the "via" column. Transit rates are shown in the "transit" column, where available.
10 Where a footnote indicates that a higher accounting rate applies on certain routes up to a threshold level, that threshold is usually set at the level of traffic at the time of the agreement. Since volumes are growing, this means that all new traffic is carried at the new, lower, rate.
11 Where a footnote indicates that a higher accounting rate applies on certain routes after a threshold level, that threshold level is usually set higher than the expected level of traffic on that route, so that most new traffic will still be carried at the lower rate.
12 Currencies have all been converted into Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), whichever currency the actual agreement is written in. The exchange rate on 1 April 1998 was 1.26SDR to £1 sterling.