The SayNoTo0870 Article Discussion Area

DonnyDave

Neil_Manners wrote: »

We got a 0870 number which was sold to us as a "roving" number which charged national rate (which 99% of our customers pay anyway)...

If 99% of your customers pay national rate for 0870 calls, then I presume many are on BT's Light User Scheme and are therefore likely to be elderly.

"National rate" implies that the cost is the same as a national geographical call, which 0870 is not.

You allow your telco to keep all the revenue. Whether revenue is paid has no bearing on the cost of the call.

As Heinz points out, the purpose of 03 numbers is to provide a non-geographical number charged at 01/02 rates.

An 0845 number could have been used at a lower call rate with no incoming call charges. This would still have been above 01/02 rates, but less worse than 0870. So yes, tar all 0870 companies with the same brush because they are either well aware of what they are doing or believe what the 0870 provider tells them without looking at the facts.

Call rates for various telephone providers can be found here:

http://www.saynoto0870.com/cgi-bin/forum/YaBB.cgi?num=1168434954

derrick

And what are you going to do when, eventually Ofcom stop the revenue sharing on 0870? I bet you will soon change it then, and I wonder if that will be to,0871? or maybe 0844?

IF you really need that sort of number then use one of the 0844 numbers that start @ 1ppm,and use that charge rate, or use 0845 that costs 2ppm from BT.whereas 0870 is 6ppm and these numbers cost up to 40ppm from mobiles.

I am a bit suspicious as to why a company keeps changing premises EVERY 2/3 years! If it is in the same area then the local area code would suffice.

If you "don't get a bean from it in any shape or form" then you got done at set up, because your supplier is taking all the revenue share from the 0870 number.

Bottom line to these numbers;- GREED!

DonnyDave

Are you the same Neil Manners who is managing director of Proact Medical which uses 0870 numbers?

bunking_off

DonnyDave wrote: »

As Heinz points out, the purpose of 03 numbers is to provide a non-geographical number charged at 01/02 rates.

An 0845 number could have been used at a lower call rate with no incoming call charges. This would still have been above 01/02 rates, but less worse than 0870.

Today, perhaps.

But when he originally got the number? When originally introduced (and until, I'd estimate, somewhere around 2003-4), 0845 numbers required the holder to pay a proportion of the inbound call costs, albeit a lesser level than of 0800. At one time only 0870 numbers allowed the called party not to contribute to the costs.

You're quite right that were he getting a number today, there are alternatives to 0870 (like 03 etc) which are of lower cost to the caller. But quite often a company's telephone number is part of their brand. Change it outright, and you risk losing parts of your customer base. This is particularly true at the bottom end of the market...all it takes is a customer of a jobbing plumber who has an old business card buried at the bottom of a drawer to ring the old 0870 number that they've changed and that plumber's lost their customer for good.

That's not so say our earlier poster couldn't open up a cheaper rate number in parallel and leave the 0870 operational, but it's all extra cost for him. It would be categorically incorrect to say that there's revenue share on every 0870 number.

Incidentally, government departments may be being pushed into 03, but a commercial organisation would be very naive to go down that path at the moment. The interconnect rates between the telecoms networks are still subject to negotiation/dispute. That means any arrangements an 03 number holder may have with their telecoms provider about whether they need to contribute to the cost of the calls is built on quicksand. If they've got these numbers on the assumption that the caller pays geo rate and that will cover all of the call costs, they may well find themselves having to contribute for their inbound calls either immediately the interconnect charges are finally agreed, or when their contract's next up for renewal. And if that's unpalatable they may end up changing number yet again...couple that with the lack of knowledge of 03 by the calling public, and personally I wouldn't touch one with the proverbial brown stick.

DonnyDave

bunking_off wrote: »

... It would be categorically incorrect to say that there's revenue share on every 0870 number.

But as I said, whether revenue sharing exists does not affect the call price, it just means that the telco providing the 0870 number is profitting more/being allowed to keep the revenue it may otherwise share with the called party, which is permitted by these companies which use these numbers.

Telecommunications is now a consumer driven market and the consumers of 0870 numbers are largely private companies and public bodies, rather than individuals. They opt for these numbers and thereby disadvantage callers by higher call charges, whether that be in order to generate revenue or not.

When BT's tariff BT Together was introduced in December 1999, national rate on it was 4 pence per minute during the daytime and local was 3 pence per minute. I refer you to:

http://web.archive.org/web/20010115212500/http://www.serviceview.bt.com/list/current/docs/Customer_Options/00374.htm

This is from the BT Price List which was cached on 15 January 2001. Table 1 shows UK inland geographical calls and Table 2 shows "National" NTS numbers, that's 0870 numbers and the daytime rate was 7.51p/min. BT is not alone in this and by creating BT Together it was responding to the changing market, thus this was a sign of things to come.

Because 0870 providers make money out of it, they like to refer to 0870 numbers as "national rate" because they were on BT's old tariffs.

Mr Manners, when did you get your 0870 number?

bunking_off

Absolutely agree that 0870 numbers are predominately business, indeed predominately large businesses - at least by traffic volume; not by volume of numbers in service.

Your link is dead, but I don't dispute your numbers (well it was either 5ppm or 4ppm for a national rate geo call). However, what the retail geo rate was hasn't got anything to do with whether there was scope for revenue share versus neutral pricing. The differential between 7.5ppm and 4/5ppm wasn't going into revenue share, it was going into the then cost of providing 0870 services.

Revenue share came about because;

a) regulated interconnect charges fell by RPI minus X % per year (X is a lot lower nowadays, but from 2001-5 it was between 7.5% and 13% depending on the particular interconnect charge concerned...not sure what the specific was for 0870). BT collect retail at 7.51ppm (in your example), take off a regulated charge for carrying the call across their network, and pay the 0870 provider the remainder. It's that regulated charge which fell at 8 or 9% a year, while retail tariffs stayed static, hence more money was paid to the 0870 provider. Should retail rates have dropped? Perhaps, but it's a difficult situation because it's BT that would drop the rates (hence get any competitive edge), but the 0870 providers who'd lose out.

b) Network equipment & operational costs dropped (= an awful lot of redundancies in the telecoms industry after the dot-com bust; I'd estimate ex-BT there's about 40% fewer people in the industry now than 5 years ago) so the 0870 providers' costs dropped.

c) Competition increased in 0870 provision hence driving down the margin that could be made.

...multiply this together and you get more money coming into the 0870 provider, lower costs, hence the scope for revenue share.

I make no secret that I work for a telecoms company, and like everyone else we have 0870 in our portfolio. However, whether we revenue share or expect a contribution from the number holder is purely down to the interconnect rates we get from BT/other carriers (*). We make no more profit per min on 0870 than we do on 0845, on 0800, or are likely to on 03. If anything, 0870 has slightly lower margins because the market in provision is more competitive. As such, to say we push customers to 0870 is just plain wrong....but I wouldn't defend the industry as a whole, and there are plenty of players out there who refer to them as national rate, as you say.

(*)It's noteworthy that we get no more from mobile providers than we do from BT, despite them charging 40 or 50ppm for 0870. They just pocket the other 32/42ppm.

DonnyDave

bunking_off wrote: »

Your link is dead, but I don't dispute your numbers (well it was either 5ppm or 4ppm for a national rate geo call). However, what the retail geo rate was hasn't got anything to do with whether there was scope for revenue share versus neutral pricing. The differential between 7.5ppm and 4/5ppm wasn't going into revenue share, it was going into the then cost of providing 0870 services.

I have corrected my link.

The national geographical rate is relevant because they were introduced on this basis. Whether the price differential between a 01/02 number and 0870 goes into revenue sharing or telcos' back pockets is irrelevant. The fact is that the differential is now a premium being paid by callers.

Most calls to NTS numbers route to UK landlines. In such cases, the cost should be just that. Anything over is a premium.

theloft

An interesting debate, but the fact remains that customers are paying premium rate telephone charges to companies who either already have or are trying to obtain their business. Companies come up with all sorts of excuses about efficiency etc; but how is it that Insurance companies for instance, have a freephone number when they are trying to sell to you, but an 0870 when you have a query or a claim! Any company worth their name in the USA would not last 5 minutes if they charged customers money to call them.
I try to boycott these companies unless I can find a geographical number to call them on and will continue to do so.

IvanOpinion

theloft wrote: »

An interesting debate, but the fact remains that customers are paying premium rate telephone charges to companies who either already have or are trying to obtain their business. Companies come up with all sorts of excuses about efficiency etc; but how is it that Insurance companies for instance, have a freephone number when they are trying to sell to you, but an 0870 when you have a query or a claim!

Could it be that they embed a certain value in the cost of the policy to cover the cost of sales but, to remain competitive and offer the lowest possible price, they have trimmed the cost of the policy to the bone therefore there is nothing included to provide support. Therefore when you need to make a claim you start paying for that service on an adhoc basis ... if you do not make a claim then you never have to pay for a service you do not use.

Any company worth their name in the USA would not last 5 minutes if they charged customers money to call them.

America is a different market working on a different pricing model with many companies going bankrupt in a matter of months.

I try to boycott these companies unless I can find a geographical number to call them on and will continue to do so.

That is your choice, but personally I think NOT paying for service I do not use is a better pricing model than building the costs into the product thereby forcing me to pay for a service whether or not I use it.

ivan

bbb_uk

IvanOpinion wrote: »

That is your choice, but personally I think NOT paying for service I do not use is a better pricing model than building the costs into the product thereby forcing me to pay for a service whether or not I use it.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion on this. Yes, these numbers may have a legitimate usage but also they're used to gain money from callers without the callers knowing about it.

The companies/gov depts using these numbers (moreso 087x) are doing so not for routing services but a sneaky way of obtaining revenue without the caller knowing about it.

If it was known that these numbers cost more than normal numbers, excluded from nearly all inclusive minutes and the fact that the called company/gov dept is most likely gaining revenue from it then I believe their would be a public outcry.

You state you like it the way it is now which is fine but how do explain companies that use these numbers when you're actually buying their product/service and then continue to charge for any support, etc thereafter.

As far as i'm concerned the truth of the matter is that these numbers (087x) are used stealthly to gain revenue without their customers knowing about.

If a company/gov dept needs to use a premium rate number then that's up to them but they never choose a 09x costing 10p/min (or thereabout) instead most opt for the stealth method of collecting revenue 087x.