Home Telephone Tariff - discussion area

REVIE

Thanks Martin,for replying so quickly.Yes you're right,the service charge for BT is a quarterly charge. Thanks again.

System

telediscount is excellent - my own provider Telewest charge me 25p per min for calls to Germany, telediscount 2p per minute. My wife regularly calls her freind for an hour at a time, now I'm not standing over her with a watch!

System

,,

Please post your points - questions and tips about home phone tariffs here.

At the moment i have the telewest package of unlimited calls at £26.00 and their blueyonder Broadband Internet
at £25.00 monthy. I would like to change my phone package to the unlimited combination at £23.49 shown in the summary section of your article. How do I go about this , Kind regards Charmaine D.

System

I am so confused! I need the cheapest option but not sure which one to go for. We have a BT landline but British Gas supply the calls. We are a family of four and were paying about 70ish pounds a quarter. I like the caller display option so would like to keep that. We don't make international calls, only local. mobile and national. We use the phone at all times of the day and evenings and very small mobile calls, mainly local. Can anyone please tell me which is the best deal?

System

Any chance of someone stating either how to get the 'ultimate' deal or the 'three provider' solution i.e. who to sign up, what it costs to join, and then who to use for each type of call at what time?

markedgar

Pia/PaulandAnita - What I would do is use Telediscount for international calls and Telecom plus for ordinary calls at any time of day for all UK calls if:

You are a light/medium telephone user (only you know your actual usage).

You want to benefit from the UK's cheapest rates for your gas and/or electricity as well.

This is what I do.

The 'deal' costs £1.76 per month (a bit different to £23.49 and the like, before you've even lifted the handset).

No minimum term contract either on the service and calls are billed per second.

You are free to use other providers too for certain calls.

Do the other telephone providers bill per second and what is their minimum call charge and minimum contract term?

I found Telecom plus services at https://www.mobiles-and-more.co.uk

As a customer of theirs I'm very happy with their services and they offer a lot more besides just home telephone services. Do the others?

Why pay loads up-front every month with BT, NTL, OneTel or whoever just to get your cheaper calls? You may not even use x-amount per month, but BT, NTL, OneTel, etc will get their part of the deal anyway. Doesn't sound like a fair deal to me (unless you make calls exceeding the monthly fee every month).

;)Mark E

Garret

I'm sorry but I can't let this go by.

In another section of this bulletin board I asked if Mark E had a vested interest in the phone / utilities company he regualrly recommends. In a private (i.e. not visibible to anyone but me) he indicated that he did indeed have a vested interest in recommending TP. I.e. he is biased. If there is arguement over this matter I am very happy for Martin Lewis to adjudcate.

If you want to know how to get the best deal read the article by Martin available on the front page of this site:

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/

and click the link "UKs Cheapest Home Phone -> more" link. If your spend is £70 a quarter then you are probably a the mid range user.

To demonstrate how TP sells itself go to http://www.earn-for-life.com/ which is the site to get agents for https://www.mobiles-and-more.co.uk that Mark E recommends. You will find they offer a good commission for advertising their service.

I draw your attention to the message at the top of this page "No advertising on the boards please."

This is not to say that TP don't offer a good service or price for a few people who don't use their phone much, but they are far from the best for everyone.

I'm sure Mark means the best, but then Tony Blair probably does too!

G

Galstonian

To be perfectly honest I don't care if the best deal arises out of a biased or unbiased view but I do need to know whether there are (possibly) other factors coming into play.

If you represent a particular provider or have some other interest in a recommendation then it is surely just common courtesy to say so. If your recommendation is truly the best then it will stand on its own merit. If not then you have no right to be making it and you are basically looking for free and quite deceptive advertising.

None of the people reading these boards is looking for advertising, there are plenty of alternatives for that. Please be honest and open in your posts, if you are not I would suggest that readers just blacklist you and ask Martin to do the same.

Garret

I just spoke to a representative of TalkTalk and he said that they do not include 0845 and 0870 numbers in their free calls. It seems that 0870 calls are 2.43p at all times and 0845 calls are 2.48p daytime and 0.85 evenings and weekends.

This is much cheaper than Ontel who charge 4p and 8p at all times. It is a bit of a catch with Ontel as it means that you can't get the very cheap calls via Telediscount - whereas a BT customer would be able to call France for 1p a minute at the weekend by using Telediscount, a Onetel customer (using the 'carrier pre-select' access method) would be paying four times that. A TalkTalk customer would only be paying 0.85p a minute which is a pretty cheap call!

I've just signed up with Ontel and am wondering about cancelling and going to TalkTalk. Is there a way of disbling carrier pre-select so the call could go through BT? I suppose I could sign up without carrier pre-select, but that would mean plugging in those little boxes to every phone in the house and unplugging them when calling via Telediscount which is a pain. This seems to mean that it is rather hard to get the "cheapest multi-provider solution" as set out in Martin's article, at least with CPS anyway. Perhaps substituting TalkTalk for Onetel is the answer.

TalkTalk say that you can have call diversion with them, but the call goes via BT so you have to pay their extortionate rates for that bit of the call.

Garret

Garret

This is now getting silly. I thougt I'd check international call costs with TalkTalk and so I called again. Whilst on I checked the cost of non-geographic call again. It seems they don't charge the prices for 0845 numbers I posted above, they charge exactly the same as BT. The rep. insisted that his colleague must have been mistaken. So it is:

0845 day, eve, w/e: 3.95, 1.49, 1

0870 day, eve, w/e: 7.91, 3.95, 2

I think I may lie down for a bit.

G