18185 and Plusnet

NonGeographicalMan

charlie12 wrote: »

Ofcom proves yet again to be utterly incompetent!

Sadly I think it is something worse than being incompetent in Ofcom's case.

It is more that it is completely the creature of the telcoms companies that is reliant on them for its main source of income and then spends all its energies resolving dispute only between telecoms businesses and never investigates disputes between or complaints from consumers.

They had 10 years to deal with ripoff 084/7 and 070 numbers and 01 plus mobile phone numbers that are in fact based in Jerseym Guernsey or Isle of Man so not covered by call packages to landline or mobile numbers.

They sat on their hands for the whole of this time and instead it has taken a directive from the European Union to cause the matter to be properly addressed.

The Communications Ombudsman (an amalgamation of Otelo and CISAS) is also scarcely any better and usually resolves most serious complaints in favour of telecoms businessed rather than the consumer who is raising the complaint.

brewerdave

NonGeographicalMan wrote: »

But most people here use 18185 mainly for UK daytime calls to UK 01/02/03 numbers because they feel they do not make enough calls in the day to justify taking BT or similar's Anytime call package at £4 to £5 per month extra.

Unfortunately if BT Retail or Plusnet (both part of BT Group) ever removed Indirect Access then it would no longer be cost effective to use them for making weekday daytime calls because the 0800 alternative imposes a charge of 1 per minute on top of the 5p per call connection fee. The situation is differentf for overseas calls where neither 18185 or any of its competitors offer flat rates for a call no matter how long.

..but even then, it will still be much cheaper -my OH forgot to use 18185 the other morning when phoning someone. Plusnet charged nearly £2 for ~ 20 minutes:eek: -would only have cost ~ 25p via 18185's 0808 number.
Therefore, if you only use the phone once or twice a week to make daytime calls and still have inclusive weekend and evening calls(as I do), it'll still be cheaper than an Anytime tariff.:)

charlie12

brewerdave wrote: »

my OH forgot to use 18185 the other morning when phoning someone. Plusnet charged nearly £2 for ~ 20 minutes:eek: -would only have cost ~ 25p via 18185's 0808 number.

Might be worth looking into getting an Orchid dialer to automate call routing - there's one on eBay at the moment. With mine in place, no chargeable calls have ever been made via Plusnet.

If indirect access to 18185/1899 is ever blocked, I hope that Finarea will continue to offer their services through the 0808 access number. It seems unlikely that BT/Plusnet will block access to the 0808, but I'm sure they would do it in a heartbeat if they could get away with it.

2013archers

Many thanks for the information. yesterday I migrated over to Plusnet & will hope to be able to continue to use 18185. After over 40 years with BT & nearly 8 years with their BB I have for the first time gone over my 10gb limit (option 1) (10.6 gb to be precise at midnight last night) for which I will be charged £5.30. so goodbye BT. I am moving to an UNLIMITED BB at far less cost than staying with BT (well worth the £35 cancellation charge).

NonGeographicalMan

2013archers wrote: »

I have for the first time gone over my 10gb limit (option 1) (10.6 gb to be precise at midnight last night) for which I will be charged £5.30. so goodbye BT. I am moving to an UNLIMITED BB at far less cost than staying with BT (well worth the £35 cancellation charge).

If you get an HD television that is capable of using the BBC IPlayer's HD television feeds the amount of data you can start to consume watching this can be huge. Over Christmas, when all the family was here, we used just over 100Gb, the majority of which was on television players or Netflix although I think my nephew was also watching other stuff on his laptop in his room.

When I was choosing which Plusnet fibre broadband service to go with my only main reason for considering the Unlimited service was because it was the only option to get speeds over 38Mbps and up to 76Mbps downsteam. The BT estimate for FTTC here was actually 38Mbps but as it turns out we generally get around 44Mbps so the 40Gb capped service would also have slowed down the connection speed. However it is a good job we did not choose the 40Gb capped service as we clearly would have gone away over our data cap.

Pre fibre broadband and my mother having a television capable of watching tv players we never used more than 5Gb per month of data at the outside and most of that was either me or my sister and my family rather than my mother who only tends to do online shopping with Tesco and Amazon and send email but never watched any online video in those days.

So it is far better to go with an ISP who will slow your data speed down if you exceed a monthly cap on a capped service rather than one that will merrily carry on supplying you without any warnings at a charge of several pounds per Gb consumed. Better still though to go with an Unlimited service where none of these problems will apply.

brewerdave

@charlie12 -thanks for suggestion about Orchid...I did look at it in the past...but as long as we have inclusive evenings and weekends (used for the vast majority of our calls) its not worth it . I have the numbers commonly required on weekdays already programmed as "18185xxxxx etc" on our Panny DECT phones.eg dentist,doctor etc and mobile contact numbers
Its just the odd "error" that costs!!:rotfl: