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But I could do this years ago on normal BT geog numbers. Why not now?

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I feel as if I am getting flamed a touch here!!!

As initially mentioned, our services we offer are for our clients & are set up in agreement with them & their users. (Helplines with a service at the end of them)  We utilse the 08x platform to give us advanced features due to the constraints put upon us with Geo numbers... this was really my main point!

Don't misunderstand me.... I agree with it being wrong to call an 0870 number to complain or as a main contact number. ( We ruled this out for our firm within minutes of it being suggested.) I feel that the carriers are getting away with these cash cows and will be very slow to change.
Clearer numbering plans should have been set up on the "big number" days, with better use made of some codes.

I'm not sure how you educate Joe Public of what we have at the moment, as it seems hard enough to let people know the proper code for London is 020  not 0207 

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If you only earn 1p per minute off your 0870s you are obviously an inept and incompetent call centre operator not acting in the best interests of your shareholders and your callc centre clients as well as not in the best interests of your customers.  3p per minute is routinely offered on 0870 and 4p is possible for higher call volumes.

The only company that only offers 1p per minute on 0870 to the call centre operator is BT and the only people stupid enough to use BT for 0870 termination are lazy and ignorant telecoms managers who fail to do their job properly by shopping around the marketplace.  For christs sake its bad enough to let your customers be ripped off at call charges of £4.50 per hour compared to 3p per hour (see www.1899.com) but to let all the financial benefit of this scam go mainly to BT is just criminal laziness by your company.

The argument you outline is totally out of date as you can now have geographic voip numbers and these voip numbers can be redirected anywhere you like and be issued on any uk exchange (see www.sipgate.co.uk).  Also your argument about disaster recover or permanent relocation is totally bankrupt and nonsensical as for a small fee your telecoms provider will put an announcement on a geographic number giving all the customers the new number to call.  The customer then just changes the number in their own records.  I know perfectly well that this facility is still offered by the telecoms network because i frequently encounter such messages on old geographic numbers for call centres instructing me to call their new 0870 number.

For you to say it is only a few p per minute extra is to indicate a complete lack of brain power and critical faculty.

For instance 20 minutes of calls to 0870 a day costs £1.50  And in a 90 day billing quarter that is 65 working days so £97.50 of 0870 calls.  Then factor in making say 10 minutes of calls a day to 0845 peak rate and we add another £21 giving us £117.50 of 0845 and 0870 calls in a quarter for 30 minutes of calls a day to NTS numbers (hardly a lot I'm sure you will agree).  Yet if these calls had been geographic 01/02 and the customer had been buying an all 01/02 calls plans with www.tele2.co.uk at £7.50 per month then they would have all been covered by this along with the customer's regular calls to relatives and so on.  So £117.50 a quarter extra gives us £470 per annum for calls that work no better for the customer than ones starting 01 or 02.

So tell me now if you still just see it as only a few pence extra per minute?  For £470 a year I could pay my car insurance or all my gas and electricity bills!

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But these are your business operational issues and not ours as customers Ted.  So why should we the customer pay extra for you receiving a more sophisticated telecoms service on your old telecoms equipment using NGNs?

Answer there is no justification and we the telecoms customer should be charged the same for calling an 084/7 NGN as any 01/02 number but you the call centres should pay an appropriate additional per call or per annum fee to reflect your additional operating convenience.  This is what happens on 0800 numbers but sadly not on 084/7 numbers.

And why isn't there a class of NGN, charged to customers at geographic calling rates, where you don't pay the customer's normal geographic phone call routing cost (as you obviously do on 0800) but you do pay a service fee to the telecoms operators for the value you receive as a call centre in the additional NGN facilities?  And as you control the relationship with your telecoms suppliers the cost of providing these additional services to you by BT et all would now be driven down to their true level, rather than also involving a revenue share rake off that has nothing to do with the additional call routing and logging facilities of NGNs.

These extra facilities you so crave could have been offered by BT et al on GNs.  The only reason they did not is because they combined the offering of NGNs with a whole extra money making scam to their benefit and to the great detriment of retail telephone customers.  But the useless uk telecoms regulators (OFTEL and now Ofcom) failed to spot this or do anything about it for years and years and years.  Yet they are supposed to be there to protect uk citizens and consumers!