After several weeks of rumours, BT has today announced a reduction in the call charges which ISPs will need to pay BT for access calls to the Internet over BT cables.

In future, your ISP will have to pay BT 0.97 pence per minute for calls over its lines from your computer to the ISP, irrespective of the time of day. In theory this could mean a call cost of around just 1p per minute - the same charge as currently applies at weekends. However, it will be up to individual ISPs to decide what call cost to levy so the reduction may not be as great.

The new tariff comes into effect in mid-December.

Despite extensive searching, we've not yet found an official annoucement of this change on the BT website, although it has been widely trailed on broadcast news.