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I've tried to word my requests to use the words/phrases  'difficult', 'sometimes impossible', 'no guarantee' etc wrt calling from overseas. There may have been the odd slip though!! I would have to go through all my own FOI requests.

The breakthrough for me was the acknowledgement by Ofcom of the difficulty faced by international callers. The Ofcom statement can now simply be appended to my FOI requests. Whatever I may think of Ofcom, it *is* the UK authority on telecommunications and therefore conveys some 'weight'! Its statement regarding problems in terminating international-originated calls to NGNs is good enough for me!

Various governmental people now seem to believe its only from the USA that there are problems calling 084/7 numbers.  I think that's all largely due to your own single handed efforts.

If only we had someone like you in France and on the Costa Del Sol too.  Then they would realise that the same problems exist from those countries too.

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But they dont tell you this on screen,do they?

It varies a lot. I'm talking only of access from mobile networks though. I have previously rung 0870 numbers from France, and French 0892 (eg Etap hotels) numbers from here or abroad, but not with cheap calls operators, only Orange here or roaming.

I suspect many GSM networks do not recognise such numbers though; whether when using a roaming phone or a local SIM, the number is in an undefined range and unobtainable. In Slovakia recently, I found that no UK 0800, 0844, 0845, 0870 or 0871 numbers were recognised by T-mobile SK. I used Callbackworld with the T-mob SIM, and will have been charged the same rate as for a UK mobile.

Conversely, it was possible until only recently to call UK 0871 numbers for 1p/minute via an operation that was calling into the UK, so there is still scope for finding cheap alternatives sometimes; just don't know how to access abroad.