SAYNOTO0870.COM - NHS Patientline 49p per minute Ofcom Investigation

NonGeographicalMan

Ex Member

Re: NHS Patientline 49p per minute Ofcom Investiga
Reply #240 - Jan 22^nd, 2006 at 4:19pm

pw4 wrote on Jan 21^st, 2006 at 11:59pm:

Your guesses of the 'likely' revenue overstate it by at least a third even when the phone revenues are included.

On average it costs Patientline about £1M to equip a hospital, so divided by the average number of terminals comes out at just over £2,000 per terminal. Patientline does not sub-contact its installation work.

DC was wrong because the information was outdated. In the first years of Patientline's operation, outbound calls did cost about 10% less than BT payphone prices, and they have never been increased.

Well excuse me for not having an inside track on the precise details of Patientline's finances. How do you know so much about this if you are not a Director or employee of Patientline? Or is it published in its report and accounts then?

The fact that Patientline is paying so much over the odds for this bedside equipment is clearly its problem and not mine. There is better value to be had in such technology if you do not use an inefficient bespoke design. And surely such systems must be widely used in hospitals in the USA and elsewhere in western Europe.

The fact that you have not increased outgoing call costs from the bedside is nothing to be proud of when BT Payphone prices for making 01/02 calls have dropped through the floor in the same period and the cost of making an 01/02 call on a BT landline has dropped substantially for most BT customers.

Back to top

IP Logged

trevord

Full Member

Offline

Posts: 248
West Sussex, UK
Gender: male

Re: NHS Patientline 49p per minute Ofcom Investiga
Reply #241 - Jan 22^nd, 2006 at 4:29pm

Quote:

By the way why do you irritatingly start a new message for every point you wish to make.

In pw4's defence here, I must confess that I have also at times done this because it seemed appropriate to keep issues distinct.

Additionally, the software tends to encourage this if you are quoting from different messages, because each time you press 'Quote' it assumes you want to start a new message.

Finally, if a composite message is going to be over 5500 char., it makes sense to split it at the individual responses or issues.

Back to top

IP Logged

NonGeographicalMan

Ex Member

Re: NHS Patientline 49p per minute Ofcom Investiga
Reply #242 - Jan 22^nd, 2006 at 4:34pm

trevord wrote on Jan 22^nd, 2006 at 4:29pm:

Quote:

By the way why do you irritatingly start a new message for every point you wish to make.

In pw4's defence here, I must confess that I have also at times done this because it seemed appropriate to keep issues distinct.

Additionally, the software tends to encourage this if you are quoting from different messages, because each time you press 'Quote' it assumes you want to start a new message.

Finally, if a composite message is going to be over 5500 char., it makes sense to split it at the individual responses or issues.

I haven't noticed you doing it in a gratuitous way like pw4 always does.

It is possible to have more than one quote in a response by breaking it up manually. If you put the word quote in lower case with square brackets at either end at the start of the block of text you want to quote and then square bracket forward slash quote in lower case and square bracket at the end you can break up the original respondents last post in to several different points to be commented on in just one post.

Back to top

IP Logged

trevord Full Member Offline Posts: 248 West Sussex, UK Gender:	Re: NHS Patientline 49p per minute Ofcom Investiga Reply #243 - Jan 22^nd, 2006 at 4:37pm NGM, why did you start a new message when replying to pw4's second point? Incidentally, I initially missed your second reply because it was on a new page!
Back to top	IP Logged

Dave

Global Moderator

Offline

Posts: 9,902
Yorkshire
Gender: male

Re: NHS Patientline 49p per minute Ofcom Investiga
Reply #244 - Jan 22^nd, 2006 at 4:41pm

Quote:

BT Together rates are what people on BT Option 1, Option 2 and Option 3 pay to call Patientline. That is the rate charged on over 95% of BT residential lines and for 99%+ of Patientline calls by call volume given that BT Light User Scheme and BT In Contact Plus customers (the only BT residential customers not to pay BT Together rates and to pay the full rates for Patientline calls) are understandably likely to be very reluctant indeed to make a call costing nearly £30 an hour.

Good point NGM. If call charges exceed the removal threshold for LUS of £15.07 exc VAT per quarter, for three consecutive quarters, then the subscriber will be moved to BT Together Option 1.

Quote:

Also please tell me where I can find the full BT rates outside BT Together as BT don't seem very keen to publicise those rates on their website?

They are here.

Quote:

...If I really had to call someone on Patientline I would use www.18866.co.uk at 15p per minute at all times on my BT line...

You mean 1899 which charges 15p/min plus 3p connection charge at all times. 18866 is 20p/min plus 4p connection charge.

Back to top

IP Logged

trevord

Full Member

Offline

Posts: 248
West Sussex, UK
Gender: male

Re: NHS Patientline 49p per minute Ofcom Investiga
Reply #245 - Jan 22^nd, 2006 at 4:47pm

Quote:

It is possible to have more than one quote in a response by breaking it up manually.

Thanks. Yes, I had worked out how to do it. Tho' to be fair, what you have described is breaking a single quote into several bits, whereas what I was referring to was quoting bits from several different source messages. The latter I do by clicking 'Quote' on the second or subsequent source message as if to start a new reply, and then copying and pasting into my first-started reply. But, if someone can't be bothered to do that, I can see why some people may just start a new reply for each separate source message.

P.S. I hope you take my second reply above in the 'tongue-in-cheek' way in which it was intended!

from probably further south of Dorking (in fact west of Horsham)!

Back to top

IP Logged

NonGeographicalMan

Ex Member

Re: NHS Patientline 49p per minute Ofcom Investiga
Reply #246 - Jan 22^nd, 2006 at 4:51pm

Dave wrote on Jan 22^nd, 2006 at 4:41pm:

Good point NGM. If call charges exceed the removal threshold for LUS of £15.07 exc VAT per quarter, for three consecutive quarters, then the subscriber will be moved to BT Together Option 1.

You have already lost a lot of the discount before you hit £15.07 That's just when they take away the last flat rate chunk.

Quote:

Also please tell me where I can find the full BT rates outside BT Together as BT don't seem very keen to publicise those rates on their website?

They are here.

I notice that they aren't displayed in a well presented PDF document like the BT Together rates are though. The BT Pricing Information Service seems not to be invested in publicising these non BT Together rates in an easy to read form which was how I came across the in any case more relevant BT Together call rates more easily. Yet you would think it was most important to have access to accurate prices for Light User Scheme customers.

Quote:

You mean 1899 which charges 15p/min plus 3p connection charge at all times. 18866 is 20p/min plus 4p connection charge.

Yes so I do. Silly mistake as I am a current 1899 customer and an ex 18866 customer. I think someone else originally misquoted which of these two was cheapest for Patientline calls. I would have thought 1899 was making a loss on these calls in the weekday daytime if not the weekend? They seem to have just averaged all PNS rates which I would have thought was a rather risky strategy. I am sure figures would show that Patientline was in fact one of the PNS numbers with by far the highest call volumes. Still there again Finarea usually seem to know what they are doing.

Back to top

IP Logged

NonGeographicalMan

Ex Member

Re: NHS Patientline 49p per minute Ofcom Investiga
Reply #247 - Jan 22^nd, 2006 at 4:55pm

trevord wrote on Jan 22^nd, 2006 at 4:47pm:

from probably further south of Dorking (in fact west of Horsham)!

I see another newish member Mike is from Burgess Hill. Perhaps we should think of a pub meeting if this Surrey/West Sussex trend continues.

As to using more than one message to reply to all of pw4's points the last item seemed a rather more complex issue probably justifying its own post. But as pw4 mainly favours one liners I don't see how he can really justify the number of posts he has used.

Back to top

IP Logged

Dave

Global Moderator

Offline

Posts: 9,902
Yorkshire
Gender: male

Re: NHS Patientline 49p per minute Ofcom Investiga
Reply #248 - Jan 22^nd, 2006 at 5:06pm

Quote:

You have already lost a lot of the discount before you hit £15.07 That's just when they take away the last flat rate chunk.

That's true. But will the people who are likely to be on LUS realise and understand this. Typically it's the elderly, so I think not.

Quote:

Quote:

Also please tell me where I can find the full BT rates outside BT Together as BT don't seem very keen to publicise those rates on their website?

They are here.

I notice that they aren't displayed in a well presented PDF document like the BT Together rates are though. The BT Pricing Information Service seems not to be invested in publicising these non BT Together rates in an easy to read form which was how I came across the in any case more relevant BT Together call rates more easily. ...

I've always believed that this is one of the main reasons that the telecommunications companies are being allowed to rip us all off and openly promote the 'good bits' of their tariffs. Before the demise of BT Standard, it didn't get a look in on the BT.com website, but of course, all 'pricing information' was on the not-so-friendly BT Price List.

Back to top

IP Logged

trevord

Full Member

Offline

Posts: 248
West Sussex, UK
Gender: male

Re: NHS Patientline 49p per minute Ofcom Investiga
Reply #249 - Jan 22^nd, 2006 at 5:13pm

Quote:

I notice that they aren't displayed in a well presented PDF document like the BT Together rates are though. The BT Pricing Information Service seems not to be invested in publicising these non BT Together rates in an easy to read form which was how I came across the in any case more relevant BT Together call rates more easily.

I agree whole-heartedly. But their Electronic Price List has been in this format for many years, long pre-dating BT Together, and contains a lot of costs irrelevant to the normal citizen. In the past, I struggled to extract various bits into usable spreadsheets, but nearly every page of their list is in a slightly different format!

I was pleased when I discovered that they have put the BT Together rates in PDF format, and I hope this is the start of a trend.

Of course, what they really need to do is to simplify the rates structure and the number of different rates charged - that would then make it easier to display the rates simply!

Quote:

Yet you would think it was most important to have access to accurate prices for Light User Scheme customers.

But at the moment, if the only list the Light Users can find is the main BT Together list, it makes them think they are being charged less than they are!
Light Users are only a small number of people that BT don't want, so why bother with them!
Also, seriously, I suspect that few Light Users have internet access, so they don't need to find the prices on the web.
Not that any of that is an excuse for making it so difficult to find the costs.

Back to top

IP Logged

NonGeographicalMan

Ex Member

Re: NHS Patientline 49p per minute Ofcom Investiga
Reply #250 - Jan 22^nd, 2006 at 5:14pm

The man to complain to is john.strutt@bt.com

He is General Manager of BT Retail Pricing Policy & Design.

A cc to CEO of BT Retail ian.livingston@bt.com might well also help.

Why can't BT just have a form on their website where you enter the number you are calling and the BT line rental scheme you are on and it gives you the price for that number. But no they let you trawl through multi page PDF and/or HTML documents with out of date phrases such as "Inland" that hail from the 1950s still incredibly used to describe call prices to 01 and 02 numbers on the so called BT Pricing Information Service (more like the BT Call Price Hiding Service if you ask me). Surely an 084/7, 09, 070 or 07 mobile number are all also Inland too though. Or have I missed something obvious. Roll Eyes

Back to top

IP Logged

trevord

Full Member

Offline

Posts: 248
West Sussex, UK
Gender: male

Re: NHS Patientline 49p per minute Ofcom Investiga
Reply #251 - Jan 22^nd, 2006 at 5:18pm

Quote:

I see another newish member Mike is from Burgess Hill. Perhaps we should think of a pub meeting if this Surrey/West Sussex trend continues.

I had thought about that at some stage.

Quote:

But as pw4 mainly favours one liners I don't see how he can really justify the number of posts he has used.

Maybe he wants to increase his number of posts!
Altho' I've noticed that 2 or more consecutive posts in the same thread do not increase the recorded number of posts.

Back to top

IP Logged

pw4

Full Member

Offline

Posts: 130

Re: NHS Patientline 49p per minute Ofcom Investiga
Reply #252 - Jan 22^nd, 2006 at 8:05pm

Quote:

It is possible to have more than one quote in a response by breaking it up manually. If you put the word quote in lower case with square brackets at either end at the start of the block of text you want to quote and then square bracket forward slash quote in lower case and square bracket at the end you can break up the original respondents last post in to several different points to be commented on in just one post.

That's actually what I do if there is more than one point in a single posting to which I wish to respond. But I respond to different subjects and to points by different people in separate posts. In my first couple of posts, you will find that I edited all my responses into one posting in the way that you suggest, but then I hit the character limit to which Trevord referred, and discovered the hard way that the system doesn't just stop accepting characters, it also starts deleting whole chucks elsewhere in the posting. So since then I've used one posting per point to which I'm replying.

Back to top

IP Logged

pw4

Full Member

Offline

Posts: 130

Re: NHS Patientline 49p per minute Ofcom Investiga
Reply #253 - Jan 22^nd, 2006 at 8:10pm

trevord wrote on Jan 22^nd, 2006 at 5:13pm:

But their Electronic Price List has been in this format for many years, long pre-dating BT Together, and contains a lot of costs irrelevant to the normal citizen. In the past, I struggled to extract various bits into usable spreadsheets, but nearly every page of their list is in a slightly different format!

The format predates the web-accessable electronic price list. In the earliest years of competition in telecoms (I mean the 1980s, not pre-1912!) BT was not keen to produce and distibute its charge schedules in such a way that its new competitors could instantly just undercut all of them. But the Universal Service obligations in its licence required BT to make all prices accessable. The agreement that was reached with Oftel was that a copy of the entire Price List was available for inspection at every 'Phone Shop'. However, BT's instructions required staff to remain with the customer the entire time that they were reading the list (in two large A4 ring binders) and that photocopying and photography was not allowed. The electronic price list is now the method by which BT meets its licence obligations, but it may be that the differing formats are (or were at the time the electronic version was first created) deliberate to make it difficult for competitors to extract all of the rates.

Back to top

IP Logged

NonGeographicalMan

Ex Member

Re: NHS Patientline 49p per minute Ofcom Investiga
Reply #254 - Jan 22^nd, 2006 at 8:49pm

pw4 wrote on Jan 22^nd, 2006 at 8:10pm:

The format predates the web-accessable electronic price list. In the earliest years of competition in telecoms (I mean the 1980s, not pre-1912!) BT was not keen to produce and distibute its charge schedules in such a way that its new competitors could instantly just undercut all of them. But the Universal Service obligations in its licence required BT to make all prices accessable. The agreement that was reached with Oftel was that a copy of the entire Price List was available for inspection at every 'Phone Shop'. However, BT's instructions required staff to remain with the customer the entire time that they were reading the list (in two large A4 ring binders) and that photocopying and photography was not allowed. The electronic price list is now the method by which BT meets its licence obligations, but it may be that the differing formats are (or were at the time the electronic version was first created) deliberate to make it difficult for competitors to extract all of the rates.

Thankyou for this rather helpful post pw4. It seems your extensive background in telecoms matters is after all good for more than just sticking up for Patientline and/or for that matter Premier. Wink

In terms of the BT price list I think some of the current layout and presentation in fact possibly stretches all the way back to GPO days. Witness the use of the term "Inland" to describe all 01 and 02 geographic phone calls.

Regardless of BT's paranoia over not presenting a complete price list I still can't see their excuse for not providing a web interface for any BT customer where after logging in on the BT site they can input the number they want to call and be told the correct rate in pence per minute on the tariff they are on.

BT's secrecy here also seems really truly pathetic when a company like the PostOffice seems to have no trouble making their whole telecoms tariff list of Specialised numbers downloadable in one PDF. And unlike BT the Post Office use bright colours and easy to read fonts:-

See ftp://ftp.royalmail.com/Downloads/public/ctf/po/Pricing%206b.pdf and ftp://ftp.royalmail.com/Downloads/public/ctf/po/Pricing%206a.pdf

Back to top

« Last Edit: Jan 22^nd, 2006 at 8:50pm by N/A »

IP Logged