Eclipse CPS package for £5.99/month

Paul_in_Plymouth

A friend has told me about a CPS package from “Eclipse” – you pay £5.99 a month for their TalkMore 3 package and get free UK landline calls, reduced international calls and cheap calls to mobiles etc.

The package sounds good VFM, I am paying BT nearly £40 a month (mostly daytime) in calls and think its time to look for a cheaper solution.

Does anyone know what they are like as a provider? Is this package any good? Your views/comments welcome please.

More info on

Heinz

Welcome to the MSE forums Paul.

If you're paying BT £40 a month, I'd say you certainly need to be making some changes.

If you've not read Martin's article on the subject, you'll find plenty of options there. OTOH, that £5.99 'Anytime UK 01/02 calls' package is, for those who need to make weekday daytime calls, the best standard PSTN CPS package I've seen.

There appears to be a drawback though in that it looks like you have to take their broadband in order to be eligible to take one of their CPS services.

If you are a new customer you can take advantage of one of our TalkMore call plans by signing up online after you have ordered one of our competitive broadband services for home users.

Personally, I've mixed and matched to suit my own circumstances - see HERE.

Of course, the MSE Callcheckers are also valuable money-saving resources (and, amongst other things, show a number of ways of bettering - by a long way - eclipse's prices for calls to mobiles).

macminiuser

WARNING: I WORK FOR THE TELECOMS COMPANY MENTIONED IN THIS THREAD, AND AM THEREFORE BY DEFINITION EVIL BECAUSE I WORK IN TELECOMMS - READ WITH CAUTION.

Heinz - with your legendary infinite knowledge of the residential telecoms market, I'm surprised you weren't aware of [company name removed by macminiuser], who offer an anytime UK 01/02 local/national calls package at £4.99 per month, with no contract.

The only condition is you have to transfer your line rental at £9.99, but they still let you use 1899, 18866 and 18185, and they don't block calls to access numbers like Telediscount etc for international calls.

CPS is fine also, though you wouldn't need to with an all-inclusive anytime UK calling package!

izatu

macminiuser wrote:

Heinz - with your legendary infinite knowledge of the residential telecoms market, I'm surprised you weren't aware of Yourcalls.net, who offer an anytime UK 01/02 local/national calls package at £4.99 per month, with no contract.

The only condition is you have to transfer your line rental at £9.99, but they still let you use 1899, 18866 and 18185, and they don't block calls to access numbers like Telediscount etc for international calls.

The terms and conditions state:

"You agree .....

b. not to allow an alternative supplier to override or bypass our service either through the installation of equipment or through the BT OPENREACH local exchange;"

Heinz

macminiuser wrote:

Heinz - with your legendary infinite knowledge of the residential telecoms market, I'm surprised you weren't aware of Yourcalls.net, who offer an anytime UK 01/02 local/national calls package at £4.99 per month, with no contract.

The only condition is you have to transfer your line rental at £9.99, but they still let you use 1899, 18866 and 18185, and they don't block calls to access numbers like Telediscount etc for international calls.

CPS is fine also, though you wouldn't need to with an all-inclusive anytime UK calling package!

We're all feeding off each other's knowledge and experience here and, although I normally ignore providers which require landline rental transfer (hence the 'standard PSTN CPS' phrase in my post), £4.99 appears, on the face of it, to be good value - so I'm the one learning today!

Then again, yourcalls.net website needs close scrutiny as izatu demonstrates above.

Line rental (£11/month with BT) - £9.99/month
Caller display (free with BT Privacy) - £1.50/month
Call barring - (£1.75/month [Premium Rate barring free] with BT) - £9.99/month

macminiuser

WARNING: I WORK FOR THE TELECOMS COMPANY MENTIONED IN THIS THREAD, AND AM THEREFORE BY DEFINITION EVIL BECAUSE I WORK IN TELECOMMS - READ WITH CAUTION.

It is worth noting that 'Ring Back' is also £9.99. All others are £1.50.

There is a reason for this - they don't want customers who use Ring Back and Call Barring (with the exception of premium rate call barring, which is free and active by default to prevent rogue diallers on your computer from running up massive phone bills while you sleep).

My understanding is that certain line services like Call Barring and Ring Back are only available when calls are routed through BT Openreach, who have much higher wholesale prices than other Tier 1 carriers like Colt and Gamma.

The [company name removed by macminiuser] prices are calculated based on very small margins on Colt and Gamma base rates. Hence, if you want Ring Back or Call Barring, calls cost much more at wholesale due to being routed over BT Openreach, so they actually LOSE money on every call you make - that average loss has been calculated at around £8.50 per month, hence the high cost of these particular services.

As for the terms and conditions stating you agree not to CPS/IDA the calls away, it's up to you whether you break that term or not - the point is they don't/can't/won't PREVENT you from doing so, nor are they able to tell whether you're doing it or not. (Apart from the fact they won't get any call traffic to bill you). The thing is, if they did try to prevent you from doing it, you'd move to another provider anyway, so they don't bother. (A concept Dunstone and chums don't seem to understand, along with Customer Service... but that's another story).

In fact, their customer services actually RECOMMEND you use 18866/1899/18185 and access numbers, and direct-dial only when you can't get through on the aforementioned. Don't believe me? Give them a call or drop them an e-mail and ask them yourself.

Paul_in_Plymouth

Heinz,

Thanks for the info. I will definitly have a more in depth look at switching my provider/calls. I think the Talk Talk package looks pretty good, but lots of mixed comments from users on these bulletin boards.

I will let you know what I do.

pricefighter

macminiuser wrote:

Heinz - with your legendary infinite knowledge of the residential telecoms market, I'm surprised you weren't aware of Yourcalls.net, who offer an anytime UK 01/02 local/national calls package at £4.99 per month, with no contract.

The only condition is you have to transfer your line rental at £9.99, but they still let you use 1899, 18866 and 18185, and they don't block calls to access numbers like Telediscount etc for international calls.

CPS is fine also, though you wouldn't need to with an all-inclusive anytime UK calling package!

Are you not an employee of YourCalls? the very company you are promoting on this site.

macminiuser

WARNING: I WORK FOR THE TELECOMS COMPANY MENTIONED IN THIS THREAD, AND AM THEREFORE BY DEFINITION EVIL BECAUSE I WORK IN TELECOMMS - READ WITH CAUTION.

I don't think I've ever made any attempt to hide the fact I work for them; although I'm merely first line customer services, and I post on here as an individual, not as a representative of the company.

I'm not particularly biased in their direction. However, the anytime UK tariff at 4.99 is the cheapest I'm aware of, so just because I work for them does that mean I shouldn't tell people about it?

macminiuser

WARNING: I WORK FOR THE TELECOMS COMPANY MENTIONED IN THIS THREAD, AND AM THEREFORE BY DEFINITION EVIL BECAUSE I WORK IN TELECOMMS - READ WITH CAUTION.

Heinz wrote:

We're all feeding off each other's knowledge and experience here and, although I normally ignore providers which require landline rental transfer (hence the 'standard PSTN CPS' phrase in my post), £4.99 appears, on the face of it, to be good value - so I'm the one learning today!

Then again, [company name removed by macminiuser] website needs close scrutiny as izatu demonstrates above.

Line rental (£11/month with BT) - £9.99/month
Caller display (free with BT Privacy) - £1.50/month
Call barring - (£1.75/month [Premium Rate barring free] with BT) - £9.99/month

There's no funny business going on with our line services - International Call Barring, Mobile Call Barring, and Premium Rate Call barring (or any combination of the above) is free. Also, you can choose to bar all outbound calls for free. To activate or deactivate any of these, all that is required is a quick call to customer services. Premium Rate call barring is activated as standard with each account unless you specifically need to call Premium Rate numbers and ask for it to be removed (takes about 3 hours to kick in).

However, if you want BT Call Barring (where you can turn each bar on or of on-the-fly using a special code and a PIN) this costs £9.99 a month because this is incompatible with CPS, so the calls have to be routed over BT - which means at our prices we actually make a loss on every call you make, adding up to an average loss of, you guessed it, about a tenner each month when you make calls which are routed over BT Wholesale.

More to the point, [company name removed by macminiuser] is aimed at people who WANT to make phone calls at a reasonable price, not bar them!

So the answer is simple: if you need BT Call Barring, don't use [company name removed by macminiuser]! Otherwise, we're as good as any other reputable independent telephone service provider. I'd recommend giving us a call or dropping us an e-mail as I think you'll be pleasantly surprised with our trained-in-house UK-based customer services team.

Also, I'd be very surprised to see any independent telephone company offering free caller display as even though BT Retail offer this 'free of charge' to their customers, they are absorbing the cost of that through their higher call charges, as it still costs independent providers money to rent the service from BT Wholesale (or OpenReach or whatever they're called today).

djohn2002uk

macminiuser wrote:

I'm not particularly biased in their direction. However, the anytime UK tariff at 4.99 is the cheapest I'm aware of, so just because I work for them does that mean I shouldn't tell people about it?

Well, you could have fooled me.