This thread has been split off from the Post Office £50 + another £15 thread in Cheap Call Providers section of the forums.

Bad news about the Post Office Home Phone I'm afraid.

I needed to call a Swiss mobile yesterday for which the cheapest method was a dial through service like PhoneBird or CleverRates but when I tried to use both these services yesterday on the Post Office HomePhone the unobtainable tone was presented after calling the number.  But when I then added the 1280 BT breakout code the call was accepted and I got through to the service.

I tried calling P O HomePhone customer service and the first very cocksure and "you customers are always wrong" type bloke told me I was mistaken and they didn't block calls to any number.  I then spoke to a supervisor who said they would have to log a fault but also seemed sure that what I was telling her could not be possible.  She then said they might need to visit my home and did I have any dangerous pets like large dogs etc I should tell them about.  I said no I didn't keep any savage lions or large rhinocerouses in my home but couldn't see why they needed to visit it to fix a fault on their network and that even legally paranoid BT did not ask such absurd questions to make a home visit.  She then said would I undertake to pay them if the fault turned out to be with my wiring.  I said the fault could not be with my wiring for this issue and was with their network so I refused to pay.  She then said she could not progress my fault.  I then lost my temper and accused her of being an utterly robotic call centre worker following the script at which point the line went dead.....................

I called back and spoke to another PO HomePhone adviser who did not seem to understand how the uk phone network operates and again said what I claimed was not possible and they did not block certain numbers.  I insisted on logging a fault and he then said I would have to call back to find out what was happening.  I said this was an outrage and asked to speak to his supervisor but he maintained there was no supervisor in the building so I asked how I had just spoken to a stupid one who had cut me off 5 minutes earlier and should I send an email to Alan Leighton or other members of the RoyalMail group board to ask why he had refused to put me through to a supervisor (I already had his name and extension at this point).  Surprise, surprise he then relented and put me through to a supervisor.  This supervisor had a brain and understood exactly what I was talking about but when I said that I could dial the number using 1280 she suggested I might be committing fraud.  I said I was not if she examined their terms and conditions and bearing in mind that they were blocking direct dialling methods to this number at which point she apologised and assured me the faults department would call me back within 48 hours.  30 hours later now and so far no call.....................................

So it would seem someone at the PostOffice HomePhone marketing department is now stopping averagely dumb customers from using dialthrough services that they just see in the newspapers but are not blocking the prefix customers from using those services as they know they are more awkaward cusses who might kick up a fuss and go the press etc.

What I want to know though is when I dial 1280 before an 0871 number where is that call going to be billed?  I would suspect on my PostOffice HomePhone bill but at BT rates??????????????????? :-? :-/

Interesting, very intersting NMG!

Did you see my post (somewhere!) with my reply from Post Office's support desk with regard to using other carriers?  Basically they said it was fine.

I don't yet have a move date even (I guess they've been inundated with joining requests as a result of their advertising campaigns), but I still hope to make use of various alternative carriers....!  We'll see ;-)

Red Dave wrote on Apr 14^th, 2006 at 8:23am:

Interesting, very intersting NMG! Did you see my post (somewhere!) with my reply from Post Office's support desk with regard to using other carriers?  Basically they said it was fine. I don't yet have a move date even (I guess they've been inundated with joining requests as a result of their advertising campaigns), but I still hope to make use of various alternative carriers....!  We'll see ;-)

I am about to install my Sipura SPA 3000 Voip ATA my sister is giving me as a birthday present and then I will make most calls with voipcheap using voip so in general the Post Office's attempts to block calls will be irrelevant as they do not control my broadband connection with Freedom2Surf.

Of course conventional dialthrough services are still the cheapest way to call some overseas mobile numbers and uk mobile phones though so not being able to use them would be annoying.  I will be interested to see what happens to those Swiss mobile calls I dialled using the 1280 prefix in terms of billing.

wrote on Apr 13^th, 2006 at 10:47pm:

Bad news about the Post Office Home Phone I'm afraid. ..... she apologised and assured me the faults department would call me back within 48 hours.  30 hours later now and so far no call.....................................

41+ hours and counting now - anything?

NGM
Before you set up with voipcheap, can I suggest you look at http://www.myvoipprovider.com/VoIP_Research/VoIP_Providers/How_to_make_free_VoIP_calls_to_landlines_20060112119/
This site makes the comparison of the various voip companies to see who offers what. Voipcheap is listed as offering 27 free landlines, but voipstunt offer 37.
That particular site needs updating, but it would be worthwhile doing a self comparison by making a list of where you need and then seeing who offers it. Although both do offer UK land for free. (I assume that one is important!)

Handy link A VNM, thanks ;)

Post Office Homephone faults did finally call me back two days later on Friday afternoon just as I was off to see relatives for three days.  So they then had to call back yesterday (Tuesday) when I would be at home to do some "Tests".

The girl who called on Tuesday was as thick as two short planks or possibly more and suggested I needed to make various test calls to various numbers using the prefix 1280 for each one so Cable & Wireless's (their underlying call routing supplier for all calls apparently on PostOffice HomePhone) engineers could trace where the calls were going.  They suggested the speaking clock on 123 prefixed by 1280 and various other numbers that would run up my phone bill.  I said what was the point of this as I knew calls made using the 1280 prefix all connected.  The girl then said she was only following procedure.  I said she clearly didn't understand how telecoms networks operated and could I speak to another supervisor.

I was then put through to a chap who when I queried hom on his background said he was "a droput from one of the major professions" viz I suppose, doctor, lawyer or schoolteacher (the latter probably being more likely).  He totally understood my issue and asked me to confirm if I had the same trouble with the CleverRates 0871 number prefixing it with 132 which is the override code for Cable & Wirless.  Surprise, surprise the number was again unobtainable.  He then tried to escalate the matter further to other engineers who said they would unblock the block on calling these numbers but then found they could not.........

I then did some Google searches and found the name of Ric Francis the Post Office's Operations Director and emailed him with the problem.

I have so far had the below holding reply.  The saga continues..................................................................................

-----Original Message-----
From: beverley.a.hodis@postoffice.co.uk
[mailto:beverley.a.hodis@postoffice.co.uk]On Behalf Of
ric.francis@postoffice.co.uk
Sent: 19 April 2006 15:52
Subject: Re: Some 0871 Numbers Barred by Cable & Wireless on Post Office
HomePhone

Thank you very much for your email.

I have been out of the office for the past week and am currently having
someone look into this.

My aim is to get back you with a response early next week.

Kind regards,

Ric Francis
Executive Director, Operations
Post Office Ltd

int:  5400 7407
tel:  020 7320 7407
email :     ric.francis@postoffice.co.uk

Any news on the 1280 routing/charging?

cowman wrote on Apr 24^th, 2006 at 9:19am:

Any news on the 1280 routing/charging?

I still await any further follow up email from Mr Francis at The Post Office or from Ofcom's WLR expert who was also looking into the matter for me.

I assume I will only know how the 1280 calls are billed when I get my Post Office phone bill with them on.  I would imagine they will be charged at BT's residential rate for calling these numbers which is the same for either BT Together or BT Standard line rental customers.

As I have still heard nothing more from the Post Office about their barring of Dial Through 084/7 and 09 phone services I have now sent this further follow up email.  I await the response with interest.

-----Original Message-----
Sent: 29 April 2006 10:04
To: ric.francis@postoffice.co.uk
Cc: alan.cook@postoffice.co.uk; allan.leighton@royamail.co.uk;
adam.crozier@royalmail.co.uk; david.burden@royalmail.co.uk;
john.pluthero@cw.com; richard.lapthorne@cw.com;
stephen.carter@ofcom.org.uk; kip.meek@ofcom.org.uk;
chris.rowsell@ofcom.org.uk; claudio.pollack@ofcom.org.uk;
matt.peacock@ofcom.org.uk; colette.bowe@ofcomconsumerpanel.org.uk
Subject: RE: Some 0871 Numbers Barred by Cable & Wireless on Post Office
HomePhone

Dear Mr Francis,

Further to your email of 19th April I see that I have still received no explanation at all as to why the Post Office HomePhone is continuing to bar calls to a vast range of 0871 phone numbers that can be dialled from a BT line and/or can be dialled on a PostOffice Homephone line by better informed customers by adding the prefix 1280 to route the call via BT's phone network. However obviously most of your customers would not even be aware of the 1280 BT override code and in any case the Post Office HomePhone reserves the right to bar a customer's excess use of that prefix code at any time in its terms & conditions.

The Post Office HomePhone has continually misled the public by suggesting that its service is exactly the same but cheaper than BT's but clearly it is not when the PostOffice adds a 10% surcharge over BT rates for all 084/7 and 09 NGNs to which it allows calls to be routed and completely bars access to a wide range of other 0871 numbers to which BT happily allows access.

I am very annoyed that as a result of your faults department being closed in the evenings and at the weekends this issue continues never to be resolved and that your outsourced customer service bureau in Brighton passes the buck to Cable & Wireless and they then try to blame the problem on these being new number ranges that they have not yet formed an access agreement with.  But it seems strange then that these numbers have in fact actually existed for months and that BT does not selectively bar access to certain phone numbers it has carelessly neglected to arrange access agreements with.

Worst of all is that the customer is just given an unobtainable tone as though the number does not even exist, instead of there at least being an announcement that the number exists but that Cable & Wireless has decided to bar access to it for PostOffice HomePhone users.

Numbers in question include:- 0871 342 2473, 0871 280 2525, 0871 806 0606 and many, many others.  I look forward to your comments.

This seems to me to be another obvious example of Ofcom's highly deficient Wholesale Line Rental Product still not being Fit For Purpose and not doing what it says on the tin in terms of the way that such services are marketed to customers, especially by the Post Office HomePhone which has always maintained that its phone service is precisely the same as but always cheaper than BT's.

I look forward to your comments.

Regards,

However I have found that www.ratebuster.co.uk has dial through numbers which have not currently been barred by the Post Office/Cable & Wireless.  I wonder who exactly is the underlying call supplier for Ratebuster and whether it is now TalkTalk who took over Centrica who formerly owned Ratebuster?

I wonder if TalkTalk is also barring use of services like www.phonebird.co.uk or www.cleverrates.co.uk for their WLR line rental customers?  Perhaps one of you who is one of their WLr customers can test this and let me know.

Also does TalkTalk allow its customers to make calls via www.ratebuster.co.uk?

I would like to congratulate NGM on his 2000th post.

However that aside, despite calling up just over a month ago about my homephone service, and no target date as of yet, I still haven't heard back from them, and it's been nearly 2 months since I signed up.

I have now received this reply from Ric Francis, Operations Director at the Post Office.

He blames my not being able to call many dialthrough numbers for companies like Callax (Abroadtel etc)  & Finarea (Dialaround, BestMinutes etc) not forming access agreements with Cable & Wireless but I feel perfectly sure that Cable & Wireless have no incentive to form the access agreement because these cheaper call services lose them money.  Whereas BT having Significant Market Power will have a regulatory obligation to form access agreements with any company that wants to connect with their customers.

What is most disgraceful is that Post Office/Cable & Wireless merely play an unobtainable tone when you dial one of these perfectly valid numbers when they could at least play a message saying they do not have an interconnect agreement with this telecoms company.  At the moment you can get round this problem by dialling the 1280 override code to route the call with BT although I will be interested to see at what rate they are charged on my Post Office HomePhone bill given that the PostOffice does not quote a rate for these numbers in its call price guide but BT have no bill to charge them to me on.  Thus clearly BT will pass these calls back to the PostOffice for billing.  And for how much longer will we have accces to 1280 with Post Office HomePhone.

Seems to me that Wholesale Line Rental is only Fit For Purpose for the needs of telecoms operators but not of telecoms consumers since it does not offer a service that is equivalent to the one supplied by BT. :( :o >:(

-----Original Message-----
From: ric.francis@postoffice.co.uk [mailto:ric.francis@postoffice.co.uk]
Sent: 03 May 2006 09:47
Subject: RE: Some 0871 Numbers Barred by Cable & Wireless on Post Office
HomePhone

Thank you for contacting me regarding the recent experience that you had
with Post Office HomePhone. Firstly, please accept my apologies for the
delay in responding, but as I am sure you are aware, the question that you
asked was a technical one and one that we had not come across before, so I
was keen to ensure that the team (and our partners) reviewed the background
to your question thoroughly.

Having now looked in to the details, we believe that the problem you
encountered is a general issue within the industry - and not specific to
Post Office HomePhone.

I say that because I can assure you that there is no policy within either
the Post Office or our carrier, Cable and Wireless, to explicitly bar or
restrict access to certain number ranges for commercial reasons.  The only
exception to this would be for the purposes of fraud protection agreed at
an industry level, and these would generally also be restricted by other
carriers such as BT... but this is not relevant to this case in point.

We believe that the issues that you are experiencing are due to the
carriers that own the number ranges that you are trying to call, failing to
make arrangements with carriers other than BT (i.e. Cable & Wireless in our
case) to carry calls to those number ranges.

As you may be aware, the current industry process is for the carrier that
owns the range to contact, and agree, the routing and commercial details
with other carriers. For example, for the range '0871 858', Cable &
Wireless has not received a numbering notification from the carrier
responsible for the number range (Callfax) and in this case, the only other
carrier that we are aware of that Callfax has an agreement with is BT -
hence your ability to route calls over the BT network. Cable & Wireless's
numbering team have confirmed that as of now, they still have not been
contacted by Callfax regarding this number range. They are however checking
their records further to ascertain if there has been any other
correspondence with Callfax relating to this matter.

Cable & Wireless are now also looking into the other number ranges in your
e-mail dated 29th April and we will respond to you further once we
understand the issue with these number ranges.

Continued In Next Post/..............

Turning to your question about whether Wholesale Line Rental (WLR) is "Fit
for Purpose", we sit on the WLR Working Groups to ensure that any issues
that affect the customer are captured and that changes to remedy the issues
are included in future releases.  The industry declared it was "Fit For
Purpose" 18 months ago, and whilst enhancements are made on an ongoing
basis, we have several hundred thousand customers making calls
satisfactorily, and receiving bills for those calls every day, without
issue.  It certainly has no bearing on the problem you have encountered.

Regarding Post Office HomePhone's price competitiveness, we have never
stated that every single call is cheaper - merely that the overall bill is
likely to be cheaper than BT. Indeed based on call analysis of our
customers, we believe that 40% of our customers save more than 20% against
BT Together 1.

Finally, with respect to the response you received from the team that you
contacted at the Call Centre, I am apologise for the perception you have of
them.  We have listened to the copies of the calls that you made and that
team initially diagnosed your query as either a fault or an incorrect
application of "call barring". This proved not to be the case, which we
apologise for.  To help improve our service further we have now taken steps
to improve that team's knowledge base updated to reflect this type of
query.

To help provide you with more information on your primary issue, we have
asked Cable & Wireless to provide copies of the relevant industry
documentation regarding routing and numbering, which we will send on to you
when we receive it.

I hope that this helps answer your query and I trust that in general you
have found Post Office HomePhone to have been a cost effective and valuable
service. If you have any further queries, or wish to discuss this issue in
more detail, please do not hesitate to contact my colleague Nick Jones -
the person in charge of Post Office HomePhone, directly at
nick.r.jones@postoffice.co.uk - who is well versed in the detail that goes
behind the question that you have posed.

Yours sincerely,

Ric Francis
Executive Director, Operations
Post Office Ltd

wrote on Apr 25^th, 2006 at 3:57pm:

cowman wrote on Apr 24th, 2006 at 9:19am: Any news on the 1280 routing/charging? I assume I will only know how the 1280 calls are billed when I get my Post Office phone bill with them on.  I would imagine they will be charged at BT's residential rate for calling these numbers which is the same for either BT Together or BT Standard line rental customers.

It will be on your BT bill with your line rental - I dial an 0844 number for my in laws in Spain and have to reroute to BT using the 1280 number as Tesco don't recognise them.

Meemo wrote on May 14^th, 2007 at 4:38pm:

wrote on Apr 25th, 2006 at 3:57pm: cowman wrote on Apr 24th, 2006 at 9:19am: Any news on the 1280 routing/charging? I assume I will only know how the 1280 calls are billed when I get my Post Office phone bill with them on.  I would imagine they will be charged at BT's residential rate for calling these numbers which is the same for either BT Together or BT Standard line rental customers. It will be on your BT bill with your line rental - I dial an 0844 number for my in laws in Spain and have to reroute to BT using the 1280 number as Tesco don't recognise them.

That may be the case with a CPS provider (i.e. where calls are routed via the other provider but line rental remains with BT), but anyone signed up with the Post Office will have signed over their line rental too - hence using a 1280 prefix on a call will not route the call via BT (or, if it does, BT have no way of billing* for the call) - because the subscriber no longer rents their line from BT and so no longer has an account with them either.

* In which case, BT will charge the other provider who, after adding their mark up, will charge the customer.

Wasn't aware post office was a line inclusive thing - thought it was just like my tesco one... does that mean these people are stuffed when it comes to dialling certain numbers then?  That's not a good thing.  

Meemo wrote on May 15^th, 2007 at 12:20pm:

Wasn't aware post office was a line inclusive thing - thought it was just like my tesco one... does that mean these people are stuffed when it comes to dialling certain numbers then?  That's not a good thing.

In today's telecom market where the consumer is "free to choose", only BT must allow access to all numbers and prefixes beginning 1.

Meemo wrote on May 15^th, 2007 at 12:20pm:

Wasn't aware post office was a line inclusive thing - thought it was just like my tesco one... does that mean these people are stuffed when it comes to dialling certain numbers then?  That's not a good thing.

You can access these 084/7 dial thru numbers with the Post Office by dialling 1280 before calling these numbers but you have no idea what you may then pay until they come in to the Post Office from BT (usually 3 months later) and it was 20% or so higher than BT's actual rates for these calls at the time.  Couldn't get any sense from the Post Office about what they charged and why.

Also never dial the 100 operator with the Post Offce as its answered by BT who deliberately charge the Post Office the discretionary £4 fee for call connection they virtually never charge their own customers.

It is reported on MSE that the Post Office will be bringing in the 'connection fee'. Expect per whole minute charging to be brought in soon......

Dave wrote on May 26^th, 2007 at 6:18pm:

It is reported on MSE that the Post Office will be bringing in the 'connection fee'. Expect per whole minute charging to be brought in soon......

In which case the justification for remaining with them disappears.

Of course mainly Ididn't use them for calls but if I had a number that kept going to answerphone/1571/Call Minder or a faulty corporate IVR queuing system it sometimes came in handy.