Asked by: Ged Killen (Labour (Co-op) - Rutherglen and Hamilton West)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what assessment his Department has made of the number of broadband cabinets that are (a) at capacity and (b) over capacity; and what assessment his Department has made of the effect of full to capacity cabinets on broadband speeds.
Answered by Margot James
The department does not hold information on the overall number of cabinets that are currently at capacity. Thinkbroadband (www.thinkbroadband.com) have recently estimated that between 1,500 and 2,500 of Openreach’s 79,000 cabinets are at capacity at any point in time.
Asked by: Ged Killen (Labour (Co-op) - Rutherglen and Hamilton West)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what recent steps his Department has taken to prevent cold calls from call centres based abroad being routed through UK phone lines to appear as domestic telephone numbers.
Answered by Margot James
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) independently regulate the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003, the framework which governs unsolicited direct marketing and nuisance calls. Unsolicited calls coming from beyond our jurisdiction remain a concern, although the ICO has not identified any noticeable or recent increase in volume in respect of this issue.
To help tackle the problem, the ICO engages with the Do Not Call Forum of the Unsolicited Communications Enforcement Network, which includes overseas regulators with responsibility for tackling nuisance calls. The ICO works with other members, including the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission and regulators in South Africa and Australia, to drive forward co-ordinated actions, including sharing relevant intelligence. They are also exploring with local trade associations, representing call centres based in India and other countries, ways to work with relevant authorities to tackle the problem at source.
The Government have already forced companies to display their number when calling, and made it easier for the ICO to prosecute those in breach of direct marketing legislation. We continue to review the ICO's powers of enforcement, and will consider what we are able to do to assist them in tackling this problem.