TalkTalk hypocrisy.

MOCHA

When BT announced their new pricing methods the Carphone warehouse chairman Charles Dunstone called them 'sneaky' for introducing a connection fee and per minute charging- http://www.talktalk.co.uk/talktalk/servlet/gben-server-PageServer?article=MAIN.UK.TALKTALK.STATIC.BLOG.3.015
so what have Talktalk now done? Yes, exactly the same thing!

Why are the phone companies taking such a backward step in calculating their charges?

bbb_uk

Nice spotting. Email them and point it out.

The reply you'll get will be the industry standard reply of keeping their prices inline with that of their main competitors (ie BT).

The real reason is, as Charles himself points out (except it now applies to his own company rather than BT), is to "makeup for any price cuts."

TalkTalk and eventually probably all other providers will follow and switch to a connection charge as well and maybe even whole minute billing as well.

mobilegossip

The TT increases/changes disappeared from their website.

I notice they are now hidden away in small print at the bottom right hand corner of page 1 of this pdf.

http://media.phonehouse.com/mediaserver/servlet/AssetServer?id=PDFS149262&ver=15&RD=YES

bbb_uk

mobilegossip wrote:

The TT increases/changes disappeared from their website.

The list of increases/changes can be found here.

These changes were first released 1st September but disappeared a few days after and have since re-appeared again on the 13th September.

The changes were first discussed in this this thread.

MOCHA

I wasn't aware that this issue had been already been discussed so thanks for the link. I've sent an email about this to Charles Dunstone (the CPW chairman) and will post any reply he sends, if he does!

BexTech

The sooner TalkTalk collapses the better.

SuperPinkTed

Ditto. I think he should be jailed for defrauding the public. There are not enough words in the Oxford English Dictionary to describe how I feel about this sanctimonious little !!!!!. Though I think thats a pretty fair start.

Old_Gold

If anyone hasn't seen it go into the CPW website and read his 5 fundamental rules and then see if they stack up to what is reality. I think it is him having fun while we all go mental.
BTW although I would not dream of directly calling him a liar but is that not what you call someone who does not tell the truth.

bbb_uk

I sent an email to Mr Dunstone on the 1st October when these new price increases came into effect. This was what I sent:-

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To Mr Charles Dunstone,

I refer to your own blog, here, where you state and I quote:-

"You may have seen that BT has recently announced some price changes. It's good to see that they're finally recognising how expensive they are but TalkTalk is and will always be better value than BT.

* Reducing BT Together Option 2 to £3.95 - Our equivalent deal is free for 3 months and only £3.99 thereafter.
* Reducing BT Together Option 3 to £9.95 as month - Ours is £8.99 AND you get free broadband included.

They've also added in some sneaky new charges to make up for any price cuts, which seems very unfair, such as charging per minute billing and a new 3p “set up” charge for all calls to mobiles and day time calls for Option 1 and 2 customers."

I would be interested in your reasons for stating that (and I quote from 3rd paragraph), "BT have added sneaky new charges to make up for any price cuts, which seems very unfair, such as charging per minute billing and a new 3p "setup" charge.." when you have from today, 1st October, introduced the EXACT same sneaky new charges and per minute billing to hide the few price cuts you did make as mentioned in your pricing update page, here.

I'm aware that your first response to this, which is likely to be a "standard" type response used by many, many other companies and that is something along the lines, 'we introduced these rates to be inline with BT or simplifying pricing also to that of same price as BT' when what you really mean is that BT have introduced new price rises and we're missing out on these price rises so lets copy what BT have done and use the age-old standard PR reason of keeping price inline or to simplify prices same as BT and blame BT.

I would be interested to hear a more original non-standard response because right now it seems you were very quick to highlight BT's stealth-type increases and pointing out how "unfair" it is when you have done the EXACT same.

I look forward to your reply
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And below is his personal reply:-

Thank you for your email, I understand why there appears to be conflict between my blog and our subsequent price change. There were two reasons we decided to follow BT

1. We worked out that if we didn't copy their new tariff structure there would be some calls that would be cheaper than using their previous system. Therefore, we would have disconnected from their pricing system and would have been unable to guarantee being cheaper than them in all situations.

2. Secondly, I am nervous of being trapped by disconncting from their pricing model. For example if they could get sufficient price rises through in calls, they could reduce the price of line rental for example. At present only about a third of our 2.5 million customers take line rental as well as calls.

So on balance we felt we had no option and having recently added free broadband to our package felt we were already being aggresive enough in comparison.


Regards

mobilegossip

"At present only about a third of our 2.5 million customers take line rental as well as calls."

So quite a few of their customers would benefit from cps their calls to cheaper suppliers .:D

bbb_uk

Check out his blog that I've linked to in my previous post!

As I expected, they amended it and now it doesn't mention the following:-

They've also added in some sneaky new charges to make up for any price cuts, which seems very unfair, such as charging per minute billing and a new 3p “set up” charge for all calls to mobiles and day time calls for Option 1 and 2 customers."

How much do you want to bet that he doesn't comment on BT's next price increase?