Has anyone considered moving from BT to onetel for their line rental? I see that they are providing this service from today. The basic rental is £9.99 per month with the extras like caller display charged at £1.50 and each additional service £1. Sounds like a god deal.
At the moment I use 18866 for nearly all my calls. I am concerned that onetel won't allow access to this once I transfer over. I've checked their terms and conditions on the website for the new service and there is no mention of this. I've 'phoned their call centre twice and couldn't get them to understand me.
Any thoughts?

8) 8) 8)

Take the line rental package,with the free calls to 01/02 numbers at weekend,and the free directory enquiry service. Use 18866 in the week and for mobile calls,and access 18866 on there freephone number 0808 1 701 701.Idont think onetel have barred it.

8) 8) 8)
BT and Ntl did not block access to freephone numbers that went to low call price providers.So whether new line rental companies can i dont know.Depending on your calling pattern you can always take One Tels free evening and weekend offer with ihe cheaper line rental,and if you make intl calls access 18866 from there landline no 0207 001 9797.(Note.I notice that Talk Talk are now offering free calls at weekends at no fee.So any users of Talk Talk reading this should  think about changeing to this package and use it in conjunction with118866.Talk Talk do allow you to access the 18866,and 1899 freephoneno,s.)

But don't you pay extra to access through the 0800/0808 numbers?  I think it mentions it somewhere on their FAQ page...

And as for Onetel's line rental, I have done some calculations and found that BT is actually a few pence cheaper (shock horror ) for my line rental (BT Option 1 + Caller ID).

This is the reply I've had from One.Tel after emailing them querying whether I would still have access to other service providers such as 18866:

Thank you for your recent e-mail.

We can confirm that One.Tel line rental works the same way as your line provider as the physical line is still owned by BT. We can also confirm that you will be able to use any prefix to route calls through a different service provider.

If you require any further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us, our E-mail Team would be happy to help. Alternatively you can visit our Virtual Customer Service Centre.

Thank you for choosing One.Tel.

Regards,

Sheetal Rohra
Senior Customer Services Adviser

Sounds good so I'm going to give it a go.

Big problem with onetel is that customer services are in India, and they are sh1t!

It took me nearly 2 weeks and a phone call to head office demanding to speak to someone in the UK, ending up speaking to a PA for one of the directors who eventually sorted the problem out (which happened to be calls going to my 1571 service supllied by onetel got a message saying my phone number didnt exist!)

All fine if all goes well, but if not you are stuck!

Rick

Quote:


Now now, that's a bit prejudiced against them

I've actually had some superb sevice from Indian call centres.  They are [usually] so much more polite and are happy to do their job because they know if they don't do it properly they'll be sacked and back, jobless, on the streets.   In Britain, the call centre staff don't have a problem with being slow, sluggish and sloppy with customer service because if sacked they simply go to the union, take legal action against the employer or failing that, get a guaranteed income on Income Support.  Then when customers complain about poor service, they whine about jobs being moved abroad.  If we British can't do it properly, someone else will.

However, after phoning Onetel's customer service line, I must admit they aren't trained properly.  Can't blame them personally - it's one of the British bigshots at the top in India trying to cost-cut.

Yes rickuk80, I think you have got a point there. Part of the  problem is that the GBP is grossly over-valued at present relative to underlying economic realities and particularly the UK's ballooning overall trading deficit.

This makes the use of Indian labour look much cheaper than it is in reality; but there is no doubt that the Premiums from illegal NGN queueing into the call centres are also being used to subsidise the increased facility costs of using India.