Brazen Babble

July 14, 2010

This is an image of a red phone box

Remember, in the days before mobile phones, when it cost just 5p to make a phone call from a red phone box?

It may have been years since you’ve used one but I’m pretty sure you’ll be shocked to learn that the minimum price for making a call from a phone is now 60p – an increase of more than ten times the rate of inflation in the last month alone.

Last month, BT has increased the minimum call charge from 40p to 60p, raising fears that some vulnerable consumers and communities could be hit hard.

The cost of making a call from phone boxes has risen dramatically over the last decade. As little as 10 years ago, in 2000, the cost was still only 10p, a sum which should have risen to just 13p if it had increased in line with inflation.

In reality it now costs six times as much, or 500% more to make a basic phone call from a phone box than it did ten years ago.

Has the world gone mad? How can this be allowed?

Let’s have a look at that reality shall we?

Who uses phone boxes these days?

Well, apart from people who’ve lost their mobile phone and cash while on a drunken night out, it would be a safe bet to assume phone boxes are used mostly by those on the lowest incomes and people living in rural communities where mobile coverage is non-existent. A phone box is a lifeline for many of these people.

So, who is this unfathomable price hike likely to effect?

Exactly the same people who can’t afford to own a mobile phone or who rely on it as a lifeline.

The fact BT is allowed to get away with such unholy inflation-busting cost-increases might suggest to the more suspicious observer that a quick check to see how many MPs own telecommunications shares maybe in order.

Shocked. Appalled. There just aren’t the words.

By Adam Moss, News Editor

July 1, 2010

THE UK internet audience has increased by an astonishing1.9 million users in the last 12 months – half of whom are aged over 50.

UK web surfers expanded by 5% to 38.8 million in May, compared with 36.9 million in the same month last year, according to UKOM, a division of market research company Nielsen that measures internet usage.

Once regarded as a virtual teenage bedroom, in the days before it was hijacked by commercial concerns, now even social media behemoths like Facebook are feeling the reinvigorated force of online grey power.

That explains why broadband is so slow I guess. I often get virtual road rage when stuck in an internet traffic jam. Now I know who causes it.

My mum.

It’s a trend which has serious implications for the way we communicate with the more senior members of society too.
Alex Burmaster, European internet analyst at UKOM/Neilsen said: “The internet is getting older in more ways than one. Not only is the medium itself maturing but the audience is shifting towards older age groups. The fact that one in four Britons who use the internet today are 50 to 64 years old proves it is no longer the sole preserve of the young.”
Gone are the days when you could dazzle a pensioner by sending a photograph you’d just taken, as if by magic, direct into their home computer.

My personal experiences of internet life will ever be the same. Instead of being irreverent and boisterous I now find much of my online time is spent explaining away compromising old childhood photographs of yours truly, which my mother has dutifully posted on her Facebook page in order to document family history for some relative in Wales she’s not seen since 1969.

Stop it mum. I looked like a particularly pale prune when I was in primary school, and dressing me in tights may have been designed to stop me developing infant pneumonia but I’m 43 now and it’s embarrassing me and your grandchildren.

Oh, the halcyon days of 1 meg broadband – if only things could have stayed that way for longer.
Now my whole online reputation is in the hands of a mischievous Saga-Lout, bent on revenging all my teenage tantrums.

Thanks mum.

By Adam Moss, News Editor