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18866 increase connection charge!!! (Read 81,085 times)
NonGeographicalMan
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Re: 18866 increase connection charge!!!
Reply #60 - Sep 19th, 2005 at 11:32am
 
Quote:
TalkTalk should have sent out a letter saying that we were being transferred and that if we didn't want to go ahead, to give them (TalkTalk) a call.

However, this didn't get sent out and the service was transferred and the first I knew about it was when the Onetel Bill came through the door a month later.


TalkTalk never send these letters but always pretend it is a mistake if anyone complains.  Because Ofcom are such a totally useless and spineless regulator abusers like TalkTalk are allowed to get away with serial flouting of the regulations so long as they always pretend what they have done is a mistake when anyone challenges them.

I was with TalkTalk and due to a "misunderstanding" with Tiscali about closing my account with them they initiated a request to transfer my CPS to them from TalkTalk which went through.  But neithe Tiscali or TalkTalk sent the required letters notifying me of the service being moved.  The first I knew was when I got a bill from Tiscali.

So all these telcos ride roughshod over Ofcom and because Ofcom is notorious for never fining or closing down an errant telco they have about as much respect for Ofcom as the average delinquent schoolchild does for a weak teacher.
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Smasher
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Re: 18866 increase connection charge!!!
Reply #61 - Sep 20th, 2005 at 9:30am
 
OK, back to the increased connection charge which still isn't reflected on the large graphic on their website Angry - isn't it still cheaper to use 18866 instead of a CPS carrier such as TalkTalk who will charge 5p min then per minute?

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NonGeographicalMan
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Re: 18866 increase connection charge!!!
Reply #62 - Sep 20th, 2005 at 10:04am
 
Quote:
isn't it still cheaper to use 18866 instead of a CPS carrier such as TalkTalk who will charge 5p min then per minute?


The answer is Yes it is still cheaper to use 18866 or 1899 for geographic 01/02 calls unless you routinely make more than 250 chargeable calls to these numbers (just over 8 calls a day) in an average month.

In this case it becomes cheaper to sign up for a cheap All Uk Geographic Calls plan such as the one from www.tele2.co.uk at £7.50 per month.

The point we are making about 18866 is that they are currently relying on deception where many customers think they are paying 2p per call only to end up paying 3p per call.

Since the company has refused to respond to my complaint I assume I would now be entitled to log this with www.otelo.org.uk or with www.ofcom.org.uk

Has anyone yet tried to log a formal complaint with the regulators about 18866s behavioiur.  I think all of us who are customers should now do so.
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dorf
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Re: 18866 increase connection charge!!!
Reply #63 - Sep 20th, 2005 at 11:24am
 
NGM,

In answer to your earlier question, I am quite sure this problem has nothing whatever to do with my computer. I checked and my message had been posted correctly on the forum. I checked in again some hour or so later - it was still there visible on this forum.

Some hours later when I checked in again the posting had vanished. I would remind you that on your own admission in another topic this has occurred with more than one of your postings.

Dorf
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Ofcom are completely ineffectual
 
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NonGeographicalMan
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Re: 18866 increase connection charge!!!
Reply #64 - Sep 20th, 2005 at 11:37am
 
Quote:
Some hours later when I checked in again the posting had vanished. I would remind you that on your own admission in another topic this has occurred with more than one of your postings.


Dorf,

Have you made a post in the Site Related section of the forum about this and/or sent a private message to Daniel the Forum Administrator?

I suppose people could remove the odd one of my posts and I possibly wouldn't notice as I don't check back on them all although I would notice if they had removed a whole very active thread in which I was a participant.

However with over 800 posts in the forum I feel that it is unlikely that many of my posts have been removed.
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« Last Edit: Sep 20th, 2005 at 11:42am by N/A »  
 
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NonGeographicalMan
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Re: 18866 increase connection charge!!!
Reply #65 - Sep 20th, 2005 at 11:42am
 
Quote:
Has anyone yet tried to log a formal complaint with the regulators about 18866s behavioiur.  I think all of us who are customers should now do so.


Neither 18866, Finarea or Connect Telecom are members of the Otelo  (www.otelo.org.uk) ombudsman complaint scheme and thus I have filed a complaint with Ofcom about 18866 not properly notifying their price increase, not answering my email of complaint about this and not belonging to an alternate disputes resolution scheem such as Otelo.

I would suggest that any other 18866 customer reading this thread should also call Ofcom on 020 7981 3040 to make a complaint about 18866's behaviour and their failure to belong to either the Otelo or any other complaints scheme.

I have just had a very unsatisfactory call back from a lady at the Ofcom Contact Centre on this issue as a result of which I have sent this email to Ofcom's Chief Operating Officer, Ed Richards.

-----Original Message-----
From: NonGeographicalMan
To: ed.richards@ofcom.org.uk
Cc: stephen.carter@ofcom.org.uk;  matt.peacock@ofcom.org.uk;jackie.caspary@ofcom.org.uk
Subject: Failure to Take Action Against Finarea Over Non Membership of Otelo or other Alternate Disputes Resolution Procedures

Dear Mr Richards,

Complaint 2530078 - Against www.18866.co.uk/www.finarea.ch for Lack of Alternate Disputes Resolution Procedure over Unannounced Call Price Increase

I have today tried to lodge a complaint with the Ofcom Contact Centre regarding the behaviour of a telecoms company called Finarea (www.finarea.ch) that provides indirect call access routing on my phone line via their www.call18866.co.uk and www.1899.com telecoms brands.  The company also operates a raft of other telecoms brands selling service to customers on uk phone lines including www.18185.co.uk, www.dialaround.co.uk, www.dialwise.co.uk, www.telesavers.co.uk, www.voipbuster.co.uk and www.voipcheap.co.uk

My complaint is that Finarea increased the connection charge on their 18866 service on 5th September without sending an email to me or any other customers to inform us and without making clear in their so called call price announcement before each call (which states that the call cost is 0p per minute but does not notify the 3p connection charge) that this change had taken place.  Also my understanding is that although after 5th September they showed the new connection fee in one part of their website they did not show it in their main call price list.  Furthermore 18866 have always previously been in the habit of emailing customers immediately to notify them of any reductions in their calling prices.

I have tried to complain to the company itself via its online web complaints form but so far it has chosen not to reply and there is no telephone number one can call to complain to either here or in Switzerland, where the parent company, Finarea, is based.

I lodged this as complaint number 2530078 in your contact centre this morning and the lady concerned said she would call me back once she had investigated the matter.

She then called back a few minutes later to say that Ofcom is aware that 18866 is not a member of an alternate disputes resolution procedure and has been trying to pursue this with the company for some time, but also fairly clearly from what she said these attempts had thus far been unsuccessful.  She then went on to say that my only course of resolution over the matter was therefore to enter into litigation with the company under the terms of the contract.  To say that the manner of the lady in the contact centre was fairly offhand and unsympathetic is to put it mildly but she was no better or worse than the generally appalling call crunching skills deployed by most of your so called contact centre staff.

Aside from wishing to indicate my continuing discontent at the manner in which calls from members of the public are handled by the Ofcom Contact Centre (where in essence the stock answer is that Ofcom cannot deal with almost any consumer's problem and that they should go away to Otelo, the telecommunications company concerned, to lawyers or to anywhere else that will save Ofcom having to do any work) I would like to know specifically what powers you have under the various Telecommunications acts to take action against an operator like Finarea and its many sub-brands to force them to join an alternate disputes resolution procedure?  Also what powers do you have to take action against them if they refuse to respond to emailed customer complaints about billing and pricing and do not have a telephone number for customers to call?

I find it totally unacceptable that a regulator who has the primary mission of working on behalf of the citizen and consumer in terms of its statutory remit always chooses to hide behind its so called "light touch" methods of operation to do almost nothing that ever shows any form of action in the public interest.

I would therefore appreciate your comments on this specific matter before I take it up with my member of parliament as an example of Ofcom's general failure to make satisfactory use of its powers.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Regards,

NGM
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« Last Edit: Sep 20th, 2005 at 12:52pm by N/A »  
 
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NonGeographicalMan
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Re: 18866 increase connection charge!!!
Reply #66 - Sep 20th, 2005 at 2:00pm
 
I just discovered this rather interesting article on the Daily Telegraph web site which sheds new light on the issue of Finarea/18866/1899 not having an Alternate Disputes Resolution Procedure.

It seems strange that no one here has mentioned this article before.  By the way what has happened to idb lately?  Has he either gone off on a world tour or found himself a job I wonder as he was the man we could previously rely on to come up with interesting articles in the press:-

http://money.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2005/05/18/cmphone18.xm...

The irony is that I would of course be perfectly be happy for Finarea not to have such a procedure provided they had not suddenly decided to rip us off by pushing through a hidden price.  This after for so long seeming that they were the telecoms consumer's friend.

Given their lack of membership of any Alternate Disputes Resolution Procedure and the fact that they have our credit card numbers can we actually trust Finarea at all now?  Also given the level of our payments to them I do not believe we even have the normal right to protection guaranteed when more expensive goods are purchased by credit card?
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bbb_uk
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Re: 18866 increase connection charge!!!
Reply #67 - Sep 20th, 2005 at 3:55pm
 
I agree that Call18866 and their sister companies should have warned us about any price increase (a week at least) and I can't say I'm not surprised that they haven't registered in any ADR scheme but has anyone thought about the what will happen when (if) they do register with an ADR scheme such as Otelo?  It will have to increase its call charges from the 3p per call to something higher because I can almost guarantee that registering with an ADR scheme will cost a lot of money and probably not even a one-off fee but an annual fee.

A normal telecoms company can easily take it out of their profits but we all know that any profits Call18866/1899, etc make can't be that high at all.
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« Last Edit: Sep 20th, 2005 at 3:55pm by bbb_uk »  
 
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NonGeographicalMan
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Re: 18866 increase connection charge!!!
Reply #68 - Sep 20th, 2005 at 4:15pm
 
Quote:
A normal telecoms company can easily take it out of their profits but we all know that any profits Call18866/1899, etc make can't be that high at all.


If they hadn't decided to suddenly try and rip us off then they wouldn't have caused me and other customers to ask Ofcom why there is no ADR process in place.

If you are going to make do without a customer call centre and don't want the regulators to ask these awkward questions as they already should have done (they only seem to have ducked it up to now because the overall Finarea operation is small and because no one seemed unhappy with them in the past) then you shouldn't do things designed to make the customers make complaints (as this latest unscrupulous unnotified change in charges obviously was).

I understand why 1p and possibly even 2p a call might not have been sustainable but they should have sent a polite email giving advance notice, explaining their reasons and saying they hoped we would still stay with them because for those only making modest numbers of calls they still offered the best value (albeit less good value than before).

Instead of which they do this on the sly and refuse to answer any complaints forms filled out on the subject on their website.
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bbb_uk
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Re: 18866 increase connection charge!!!
Reply #69 - Sep 20th, 2005 at 4:29pm
 
I agree with you and you are right if they would have bothered to email us, and respond to your email (or other emails) about this then you wouldn't have needed to complain to OfCOM about them and especially about not having an ADR scheme.

Basically what I'm saying is when they sign-up to an ADR scheme then don't be surprised if call charges are increased again to pay for it.  This will also apply to Call1899 and the other sister companies as well because it is extremely unlikely they could do this out of their profits (if any).

Remember that because of the way the termination payments work then Call18866/1899, etc all have to pay BT (or whichever landline company the call terminates at) so much per minute and hence the reason why all other telephone providers charge x amount per minute. This ensures they don't lose too much money.

I have often wondered how they could survive on just charging a connection fee and having no specific maximum call length before a ppm charge applies.
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NonGeographicalMan
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Re: 18866 increase connection charge!!!
Reply #70 - Sep 20th, 2005 at 4:45pm
 
Quote:
I have often wondered how they could survive on just charging a connection fee and having no specific maximum call length before a ppm charge applies.

I think you will find that in the wholesale calls market for calls to geographic numbers there is only an originating and terminating call fee made of around a penny or so in total.

It is only NGNs that charge on a per minute basis to support the per minute revenue share arrangement.  Also 18866 and 1899 are routing their calls over voip to a lot of destinations, where I believe termination charges made are once again lower.

There are only two possible motivations for running an outfit like Finarea and one is to build up a massive list of customers so as to sell the company on and the other is to make a profit on all the calls currently routed.

It strikes me that the scale of Finarea's operation (no advertising etc) is not enough to be based on the build the big customer base and flog it model so I feel they have been making a profit in general.  Of course it may well be that the specialist deals they had in place for routing their calls no longer exist.

Also my other original theory was that Finarea's various companies were using up surplus call capacity on existing business telecoms networks.  And given how much Finarea has grown it may be that this spare capacity no longer exists so they have to charge the market price for acquiring fresh calling capacity to handle the extra customers.  I think that probably lies behind these recent price rises.

But perhaps we should ask Mr Darren Thomas of Call18866 for a statement? Wink Grin
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« Last Edit: Sep 20th, 2005 at 5:00pm by N/A »  
 
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bbb_uk
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Re: 18866 increase connection charge!!!
Reply #71 - Sep 20th, 2005 at 4:57pm
 
Quote:
I think you will find that in the wholesale calls market for calls to geographic numbers there is only an originating and terminating call fee made of around a penny or so in total.

It is only NGNs that charge on a per minute basis to support the per minute revenue share arrangement.....
I had an interesting conversation with MSE forum member Bunking_off who appears to work in the telecoms industry and he said that BT still charge a per minute termination fee even to geographical calls.

I mentioned this in this post earlier on (post #12) and it includes a link to the relevant MSE forum page where we discussed this.

I've no idea on termination fees payable for VoIP calls.

In my opinion then no matter which carrier you use BT always seem to gain!
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NonGeographicalMan
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Re: 18866 increase connection charge!!!
Reply #72 - Sep 20th, 2005 at 5:08pm
 
Quote:
In my opinion then no matter which carrier you use BT always seem to gain!

If you route your call overseas BT is cut out completely and if you route your call to NTL, Telewest or Cable & Wireless customers BT is cut out completely.  Also BT don't get the originating call fee on any BT line for a call routed via the prefix code.  They only get a terminating fee if the geographic number you call is on a BT line.

BT Wholesale may still charge per minute, which is why BT Retail Option 3 is so expensive.  But certainly their rival competitor networks do not charge per minute.  Also if BT actually charged per minute surely they would lose a fortune with self employed salesmen working at home and using BT Option 3?  As I understand it there is no upper call value limit in a quarter on Option 3, although I suppose they may expect to recoup such cost from most Option 3 lines from the high percentage of calls that normal uninformed people will have to make to 0870 numbers. Wink
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bbb_uk
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Re: 18866 increase connection charge!!!
Reply #73 - Sep 20th, 2005 at 6:14pm
 
Quote:
If you route your call overseas BT is cut out completely and if you route your call to NTL, Telewest or Cable & Wireless customers BT is cut out completely
I agree but majority of calls unfortunately end on BT due to their monopoly.
Quote:
BT Wholesale may still charge per minute, which is why BT Retail Option 3 is so expensive.  But certainly their rival competitor networks do not charge per minute.  Also if BT actually charged per minute surely they would lose a fortune with self employed salesmen working at home and using BT Option 3? As I understand it there is no upper call value limit in a quarter on Option 3
I understand that Telewest, etc do charge a termination fee just like BT.  It doesn't really matter how much the termination fee is - what matters is that Call18866/1899, etc could be losing money on that individual call depending on its length.

There is an hour limit on calls for those stupid enough to go on BT option 3, or TalkTalk 3 packages.

I think the per minute termination fee is possibly reason why OneTel are in debt (due everyone making use of the free evening&weekend unlimited minutes) and possibly reason why TalkTalk have a pathetic limit of 70minutes for their so-called free calls. That way for those that forget about the 70min then TalkTalk haven't lost as much money on that call.

What is weird is that TalkTalk to TalkTalk calls have about 3 hours (or something similar) before call becomes chargable which probably means that part of the deal of TalkTalk using CPS (and paying the extorniate CPS fees) is that possibly calls terminating to a customer who uses TalkTalk as their CPS provider means that BT may not get there per minute termination fee but just possibly a connection fee or something otherwise why else would TalkTalk have a much higher limit call length on TalkTalk-2-TalkTalk calls but not on ordinary geographical calls, not even on their Talk3 package?

Were these telecom companies may lose money on a certain call they hope to gain it on other calls like the expensive NGN, etc or going over your time-limit (in the case of BT and TalkTalk).
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« Last Edit: Sep 20th, 2005 at 6:16pm by bbb_uk »  
 
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NonGeographicalMan
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Re: 18866 increase connection charge!!!
Reply #74 - Sep 20th, 2005 at 6:22pm
 
Quote:
Were these telecom companies may lose money on a certain call they hope to gain it on other calls like the expensive NGN, etc or going over your time-limit (in the case of BT and TalkTalk).


Perhaps 18866 thought they would recoup more money than they have done on their disgraceful 9p a minute charge to 0870 numbers.  Its strange they need to charge that when dialaround and another Finaria NGN brand carry calls to 0870 for 5p per minute.

I expect they have found most 18866 customers actually revert to using BT or dialaround for their 0870 calls though.
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