C&W may be business to business - but they have a stock exchange listing and hate any bad publicity.

The mobile phone companies all have high "churn" rates; and are also sensitive. If we can one of them to make a big charity donation it could start the ball rolling with others.

Richard Branson @ Virgin Mobile would be best to start with. Does he still have a part of Virgin mobile?

Noted, but I was refering to whoever was responsible for making that number 0870 ..... nothing to do with the mobile phone operators.

juby

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To be fair dorf the people manning these numerous call taking centres that the 0870 number distributes to are police staff of one kind or another.  They are not employees of cable & wireless who are getting the revenue share on the calls.  So I would not like to suggest that any police staff are deliberately extending these calls or have any incentive to.

But the point is that when Cable & Wireless set the specification for these emergency call handling systems for Pito they knew full well that because of the nature of the enquiries and the massive peaks in call volume that the calls would always be long and there would be queues.  So that is why they offered to provide the relatively complex call centre rerouting product (a more genuine reason for using the whole NTS system than those scammers who simply use 0870 to earn money on calls directing to only a single call centre) to Pito for nothing because they knew that although it was a more complex call centre rerouting system to set up and maintain (particularly due to the huge call volumes in the early days) the payback would be absolutely huge in a major incident like this one occurred.

The Pito people here though have behaved totally negligently by not setting a financial cap on what cable & wireless could earn in the original contract and also demanding that any money beyond this goes to charity or to the vicitims.  Also in view of the call volumes that were always likely to be received it is quite incomprehensible that they would have agreed to any worse a deal than the use of an 0845 number .  To have agreed to 0870 indicates the worst sort of negligence by the Pito people.  Or they could even have insisted on a 1p a minute at all times 0844 number which really nobody could have been very upset about as it is cheaper than a national call for most people at many times of day.  Except of course for overseas callers and mobile callers who would still be asked to pay ripoff rates.  That problem is a whole other problem that again reflects acute regulatory failure by Ofcom.

The gentleman offering the charitable donations is:-
richard.lapthorne@cw.com   You may care to email him with your suggestions.

You can do honest business, or dishonest business.

The way I see it, anyone/company who operates, sells or promotes 0870 numbers is running a dishonest business. They are relying on ignorance to gain revenue.  Any company that deliberately makes money out of it's customers by hiding costs from them is dishonest. A company who uses an 0870 number is doing just that.

Hi NGM, I did not suggest to whom the revenue was actually going.

Hi Alternative, I am afraid your calulations are incorrect. The average chargeable time per call has been 30 minutes. If there have now been 200 000 calls altogether then that will be at 4 p per minute for each call of 30 minutes - rather a larger amount than you suggest.  (I am not sure where you get the figure 200 000 from, since that is not a number which I have seen published yet.)

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What a load of tosh. Unethical behaviour is NOT considered ususal business practice at all. There are always roques but in the end you can't build a business on deceit. It will blow up in your face.

I've seen a reference to the high cost of making enquiry calls on teletext and today, on GMTV John Stapleton made reference to it. So slowly this is getting through, but will it do any good I ask myself.