charges for 07744 simply-fone/merged

andy88_2

blinker wrote:

serves Orange d**n right!!

if it saves them £1000 a year per customer, it probably will serve them well

carmenes82

In order to get a refund with Orange (which will only work up until they put the premium rate announcement up on the 12th April), you need to make sure that your complaint keeps getting escalated. I spoke to 3 customer service advisers who told me I was wrong and was 'abusing their billing system'. I insisted that someone more senior contact me and eventually (within the day) their Customer Services Manager called me back to apologise and credit the money back.

The problem with Orange Customer Services is that they don't disseminate information amongst their staff. If all their staff knew that they were refunding up until the 12th but not thereafter, I would have got my credit and not wasted 30 minutes of their time and mine.

Am tempted to move from Orange now as my contract expires in May...any suggestions?

Car.

benji_3

carmenes82 wrote:

Am tempted to move from Orange now as my contract expires in May...any suggestions?

QUOTE]


Yes! absolutely!

join the exodus from those nasty Orange people & take out a contract with either T-Mobile or O2 - with no loss of quality, nice CS and MOST IMPORTANTLY continue to use 07744 974 363 to make free calls overseas as i do to every month
HA HA yippee! :beer:

minim55

carmenes82 wrote:

In order to get a refund with Orange (which will only work up until they put the premium rate announcement up on the 12th April), you need to make sure that your complaint keeps getting escalated. I spoke to 3 customer service advisers who told me I was wrong and was 'abusing their billing system'. I insisted that someone more senior contact me and eventually (within the day) their Customer Services Manager called me back to apologise and credit the money back.

The problem with Orange Customer Services is that they don't disseminate information amongst their staff. If all their staff knew that they were refunding up until the 12th but not thereafter, I would have got my credit and not wasted 30 minutes of their time and mine.

Am tempted to move from Orange now as my contract expires in May...any suggestions?

Car.

Hi carmenes82
Thanks for your advice and well done on getting your refund. I had been making calls using Orange and Simply Fone. I stopped after I got the message that calls were charged at a premium. I called Orange but they refused to refund me even when I said I didn't know about this premium charge. Did you make your call to Orange recently or was it before or on the 12th April?

jjames_3

michaels wrote:

It would be better if ofcom did not quote the number as a mobile number on their website.
Plus what is the difference to orange between 3 charging orange 25p a minute and poceting it all and simply-fone charging orange 25p a minute, pocketing some and using the rest to pay for the 'forwarded' part of the call

Firstly the termination rates for cross-provider calls are nowhere near 25p per minute.

More importantly though, the providers work on the assumption that the number of calls received by a given network will be broadly similar to calls made out from it. So whilst Vodafone <-> Orange traffic will be fairly even, Vodafone <-> Simply-Fone is one-way traffic only, so the more calls are made using this system, the more the mobile firms lose.

While I don't like the cack-handed way Orange have dealt with the charging, it is entirely understandable. I would put money on O2, BT Mobile, T-Mobile etc charging for these services in the near future, so don't get yourselves tied into contracts with these providers just for 07744 numbers whatever you do.

marjorie_2

jjames wrote:

I would put money on O2, BT Mobile, T-Mobile etc charging for these services in the near future, so don't get yourselves tied into contracts with these providers just for 07744 numbers whatever you do.

why the heck not!!

as long as they are including 07744974 363 i say .. GO FOR IT!!
get youself an O2 or t-mobile contract & use those minutes up calling overseas!!

must be nuts not to. Also, i reckon lots o'people are joining 02 & t-mobile for this 07744 offer and O2 / T-Mobile allow these calls as they know they are creating brand loyalty.

People do not leave if they rec good perks & 07744 974363 hass got to be one of the BEST. :rotfl:

jjames_3

The point is, no-one knows how long O2 and T-Mobile are going to continue their stance.

What happens if thousands of people move from Orange and Vodafone to other providers because of these 07744 numbers that are LOSING THE MOBILE COMPANIES MONEY.

What I'm saying is, not that people shouldn't join T-Mobile or O2, but that if you do get yourself tied in to an 18-month contract in some cases, at £30 a month, and then find that the sole reason for getting the contract -- to use 07744 numbers -- is gone, you're stuck with an expensive phone that you're still having to pay for. Just as folk have with Orange.

And at the end of the day, if they're taking in £30 a month and paying out £50, plus administration plus the cost of the phone and all the rest of it, it is only a matter of time before O2 and T-Mobile jump on this service and start charging for it.

The figures become even more extreme when you're talking about these £20/month for 1000 off-peak minute type offers -- there's a potential for huge losses here.

michaels

@jjames - somewhere else on this forum is a link to a bt list which states the termination charges to three at peak times are of this magnitude (three were not included in the recent ofcom decreed price reductions)
Plus your '2way' point - is this the case? some like virgin mobile who specialise in 'pay as you go' type services may be used a lot more for receiving calls than for making them?

andy88_2

It isn't the only way to make cheap international calls from a mobile. Perhaps if it had not been overused for the cheapest calls Orange would not have noticed. Only the destinations that otherwise cost from about 8p to 15p were exclusive to this, including India and Pakistan, which were presumably the favourites.

It's a bit strange to say that everybody went to Orange only because of this, and now they're going elsewhere because of it; there were three networks available, now two.

It would be surprising if the service stays the same after Ofcom's review of cross-network termination charges later in the year, especially as Dolphin is semi-defunct. You can safely assume that the larger companies will continue to argue that assymmetric termination fees constitute an unjustified subsidy of the newer operators.

jjames_3

michaels wrote:

@jjames - somewhere else on this forum is a link to a bt list which states the termination charges to three at peak times are of this magnitude (three were not included in the recent ofcom decreed price reductions)
Plus your '2way' point - is this the case? some like virgin mobile who specialise in 'pay as you go' type services may be used a lot more for receiving calls than for making them?

Yes, I must admit I glazed over the 3 point of your post -- 3G services are not currently regulated in the same way (although with the rate of increase in market share 3 are currently enjoying this is bound to change).

As for the 2-way point, I know someone who works at Orange and he tells me this is the way things work -- although the figures are not exact, on balance the number of calls going out are similar to those coming in, bearing in mind that calls within the network and to geographical numbers are pretty much FOC. As far as the likes of OneTel, Virgin and EasyMobile are concerned, these are resellers of other networks' products so their figures are included in the Vodafone/T-Mobile figures. Orange don't have agreements with third parties, but I think it's the case that T-Mobile will pocket the profits from incoming calls, and Virgin are just relying on the margins from outgoing.