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National Rail Enquiries (update)

In an earlier post (This weeks greediest corporation award goes too….) I named and shamed Network Rail. I also wrote to them to outline my anger and accused them of sharp and uncompetitive practice. This was their reply.

Network Rail Email

Dear [The Daily Male]

Thank you for your eMail.

I am sorry to hear that you are unhappy with the cost of the National Rail Enquiries iPhone Application and the subsequent withdrawal of the MyRail Lite iPhone Application.

I can confirm that we did not withdraw the real time licence for MyRail Lite as the application was never licensed to use that data in the first place.

Although the MyRailLite application was not licenced to use National Rail Enquiries real time data, National Rail Enquiries did suggest an alternative solution to enable the product to continue but the developers refused.

National Rail Enquiries has not imposed a limitation on developing rail applications for iPhone. Timetable data is widely available and developers are free to use such data to develop applications if they wish having sought the relevant permissions from the industry data providers.

National Rail Enquiries provides a number of mobile web services including the iPhone application, which does have a one time £4.99 download fee. Our other services include WAP (though iPhones do not support WAP) and our PDA site at pda.ojp.nationalrail.co.uk, which are free to use.

The cost of the iPhone Application is not for the data but development and support costs. The data is offered to users of the application for free and the same data can be accessed through other channels such as the website.

Regards,

[removed]

Customer Services

www.nationalrail.co.uk

The implication from this email is that rail timetable data is FREE to use and only the app development costs have led to the £5 cost of the rail enquiries app. This is even worse. They have admitted that they are providing free data to their own app developers but restricting the flow of this free data to any or all rivals based on their own licensing rules. This is most definitely uncompetitive behaviour and my next course of action will be to contact the OFT (Office of fair trading) and request an investigation into Network Rail Enquiries practices.

This entry was posted on 02/04/2009 at 03:01 pm and is filed under Technology, Society, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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2 Responses to “National Rail Enquiries (update)”

  1. Andy Lee says:
    03/04/2009 at 05:02 pm

    Dear [The Daily Male]

    I too will be contacting the OFT to register a complaint about this, you may also wish to view:
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/03/who_owns_train_times_or_th.html

    Many thanks

    Andy

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