Accusations of British Telecommunications masterminding a dirty tricks campaign against its rivals intensified last week when telecoms regulator, Oftel, pressured the company to speed-up its investigation into the claims. The allegations against BT are that it is abusing its access to ex-directory numbers to poach customers from cable companies – the complaints have escalated since the first cries of ‘foul play’ last month. The original complaints involved allegations that BT told customers they would be charges by other operators for engaged signals, and that if they transferred from BT they would not be listed in the phone directory. The latest incident comes four weeks after BT launched a ‘cold-calling’ marketing campaign to win back customers that had gone to cable companies – currently estimated at 50,000 a month. The only problem was that it also included calls to ex-directory customers. Oftel has received almost 50 complaints from cable companies, but BT maintains that it was a software glitch that lumped the ex-directory numbers in with the numbers being targeted by its campaign. The Associated Press reports that the International Telecommunications Union is to introduce global toll-free numbers from next February. For a registration fee of $160, companies can apply for single number to let customers contact them from anywhere without paying call charges. Cabletron Systems of Rochester, New Hampshire, has signed with UK – based computer telephony specialist, Single-point, to integrate the latter’s Alarm/Point into its Spectrum Enterprise Management platform. Alarm/Point is designed to receive SNMP traps and convert them into voice messages to alert managers of problems on the network. Alarm/ Point will interface directly with Spectrum’s Alarm Manager.
