Dave wrote on Aug 27^th, 2010 at 3:07pm:


Good work Dave.  This should certainly help to focus the attention of their lady finance manager on the popularity and cost effectiveness of their 0844 number vs a cost neutral 03 prefixed number.

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I absolutely agree with you Dave but we have useless and/or corrupt OfCoN (I personally favour the latter theory giving the lack of any significant restriction on most of their middle ranking policy staff on jumping straight back in to jobs in the telecoms sector) to thank for this along with the fact that certain 116 Europe wide helpline numbers now being introduced (eg the Samaritans) will be free to call from all numbers, some will only be free from landlines and some will have a fixed fee per call even on a landline.  The fact that BT does not have to make a pre connection call cost announcement for all non standard rated calls from BT Public Payphones or publish the prices of those call types in their Public Payphone boxes (apparently all 0844, 0845 and 0870 calls are actually now charged at one single 20p per minute rate and all 0871 calls at one single £1.00 per minute rate so there is hardly a space problem) is an utter disgrace as is the so called BT price list that currently also seems to be broken on their website (or at least on the link to it from the BT Payphones website at www.payphones.bt.com/publicpayphones/paymentprices.htm)  so that you cannot get the price of any non standard call.

Turning back to Cruse any research must surely show that by far the largest percentage of the bereaved are actually aged 18+ with the largest segment being 30+ and with by far the most vulnerable group being single people (either the elderly and/or those who are not currently in a relationship or who do not have any children, especially if the deceased person was also their partner) who live on their own (who therefore have no support when they are at their lowest in the early hours of the morning which is almost always the worst time for anyone who is recently bereaved) so for them to target only the under 18s who are bereaved when most under 18s who are bereaved must normally be living with people who can provide some on the spot support seems like a nonsense to me.

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Dave wrote on Aug 27^th, 2010 at 4:21pm:


Are you saying that their vast and monolithic size also gives them an excuse to be totally incompetent on something as crucial as call pricing?  When their prices are as unreasonably high as they are for 084/7 numbers for BT Payphones surely it should be their duty to actively publish them in an easily understandable form and not mine to extract them like getting blood out of a stone.  All I can get from the redirect link is a few zip folders containing htm links that give me parts of pricing web pages.  This is not even a vaguely useable document.

Thousands of customers a day ought to need to be able to access their pricing list and their pricing manager should be monitoring that the information is accessible every day.

I have reported the matter using the officially listed complaints number for BT Payphones at ww.payphones.bt.com/contactus/bytelephone.htm of 0800 661 610.  What else exactly would you expect me to do beyond this?  I'm at a total loss to understand your suddenly hostile attitude when I thought we had just achieved a positive outcome for bereaved people needing to talk to Cruise.  Its as though you have suddenly turned in a moment in to rude DaveM (not to mention andy9) instead of polite Dave.

Or has this sudden change in tone by yourself something to do with me making a post in response to SCV's post about the RAC motoring forums?  I'm quite happy to absent myself from the forums again completely if you and SilentCallsVictim would rather have them entirely as a place for your own private personal discussions.

I also wonder whatever became of our forum moderator bbb_uk by the way?  Answering my own question I see he has made only a handful of posts since April 2009 although one of them was only a couple of weeks ago.  I wonder why this moderator suddenly seemed to lose interest in his job?  Did he perhaps find that he couldn't compete successfully with Dave?

Dave wrote on Aug 28^th, 2010 at 11:39am:


I have also now reported this issue directly to BT Payphones Manager John Lumb and he has responded by email to indicate he will look in to the matter.

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Sorry I just don't agree with you here as the BT Price List has very longstandingly been a deliberately impenetrable and hard to use document.  In the era of the internet there is no excuse for me to not just be able to enter a phone number I want to call and also specify the point of call origination (i.e. BT Payphone rather than BT Residential with such and such a price plan) and get a price per minute along with the connection charge.  I should not be expected to wade through a 100 page document that is no longer in a contiguous form but broken in to numerous random web pieces without any index to those pieces.

I am astounded that as webmaster of a site dedicated to stopping people being ripped off by 084/7 numbers that you should appear to condone such incompetent neglect of access by the public to price information about using BT's services.  Do you suppose that they would leave their web page allowing you to "Come Back To BT" down for more than a few minutes of the day?  No of course they wouldn't because it would cost them money.

There is no excuse at all for how hard BT makes it to get hold of prices for using its payphones (as I told you previously there are no prices published in the payphone box for 084 or 087 numbers or mobile numbers), especially when many of its rates to numbers other than those starting 01/02/03 are so unreasonably high.  If they were forced to publish them as actively as they publish their rate to call 01/02/03 numbers from a Payphone then I very much doubt they would be anywhere near as high as they are.

I really don't appreciate your tone with being told to "Get Over It" and so on when to my mind BT's repeated failures to make pricing inaccessible for numbers other than 01/02/03 are at the very heart of their whole scam with conning customers in to buying "Anytime" calling plans while not telling them that loads of numbers that they routinely call will not be included in the plan.

This website has already lost most of the original participants in its discussion forum due to the ambiguous commercial behaviour of the site owner and due to bad moderating in the past by DaveM when he used to be more active in the forum.  If you carry on with these abrasive comments towards forum members who share the same underlying campaigning objectives as yourself I would suggest that the site will very soon have almost no traffic at all.  As things stand the NonGeographicalChat section consists of only one page for the entire month of August.  This is way down on previous years.

Yours disappointedly

NGMsGhost

Dave wrote on Aug 28^th, 2010 at 12:53pm:


Well I certainly mentioned it in my email to BT's Payphone Manager cc'ed to members of their Executive Board as that was the last bad experience I had with a Payphone in July when I had a flat mobile battery and my £1 scarcely lasted long enough to give my friend the payphone number to call me back on from his mobile (he has extensive free bundled minutes).  I tried to find out the cost of calling a Vodafone mobile before making the mobile call but the operator on 100 couldn't tell me and I didn't get through to customer services even after holding for 10 minutes.

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It merely demonstrates the complete absurdity of their current pricing regime from BT Payphones when other regular numbers people need to call like bus enquiry lines cost 9990% more per minute to call than an 01/02/03 number.

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But what we can have is a situation where people who just want line rental without any bundled minutes (many of them may only want the line for broadband) can obtain it at a cost that does not cross subsidise customers who make lots of calls with BT or especially families who make large large numbers of minutes of calls per month.   Why should the elderly widow or the young single person who almost never make any calls cross subsidise those who make a lot of calls?

It is complete and utter rubbish for you to claim which numbers customers routinely call has nothing to do with BT as it has everything to do with their pricing strategy and their efforts to make formerly local rate business numbers in to an overt and/or covert premium rate class of numbers that cost a fortune to call (especially from BT Payphones).