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Its the same reason as 0845 and 0870 that BT have grown so used to isn't it.  Namely blatant and cynical scamming by an increasingly dishonest tribe of British marketing folk.

Market headline advertising that its only 5.5p per hour and then let the 17 year old chat to her boyfriend for 2 hours not knowing the second hour is clocking up £1.80 of call charges on the family phone.

Ofcom should come down up on BT like a "ton of bricks" over this because they are "out of touch" also known as "light touch".

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I suspect you are right.

The more BT customers sign up with Tele2, Onetel etc on CPS or start using Voip with Skype or even Dixons then the more BT need to scam the remaining sheep who still make their calls with them.  But the regulator should not let them hide a major price increase affecting all customers in this way.

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And that's probably the reason for the 'selected call types' phrase.

[quote author=jrawle  link=1128887840/15#19 date=1129038474]

Do you suppose they'll round the Friends and Family discounts on each call up to the nearest half a penny too?
[/quote]

I'm was finding Friends & Family discounts are now almost wortheless, unless you keep them mainly Mobile and/or 08... rate numbers , the ones we try to avoid calling at all.

Sadly I'm still one of these lazy sheep who just cann't be bothered spending my life hunting endlessly for cheaper calls, meanwhile continuing to kid myself that BT still provides a better service than the minefield of alternatives out there.   But such delusion is becoming harder & harder to maintain & I do use the alternatives for all International calls at least.   Thanks for the pointer on 0870 alternatives .  I'll check it out.
  I tend to use this web site to avoid 0870s, use 0845 for very occasional PAYG internet access, and use all sorts of 08 Dial through numbers for international calls.
Oddly I do still appreciate the convenience of getting it all on the same bill as well as being able to know what each 08 number actually costs without too much difficulty on BT..

I just sent the below message to the WatchDog and You & Yours program teams to try and unmask BT's hidden price rise scam on Oct 1st.

My calculation is that the hidden rounding up by 0.5p instead of 0.1p on each call could be worth £20 million to £30 million a year.  So if you were BT why not take the money when a dosy regulator like Ofcom allows you to and an often equally lazy consumer press does not spot the fact.  I will also send this to a few newspaper consumer journalists:-

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To:- BBC Watchdog and to BBC You & Yours Programs

BT have tried to sneak through two significant price rises from 1st October 2005 which they have tried to hide away in the small print of one of their Update magazines with BT phone bills - www.bt.com/update

1. Firstly they are changing the way they charge offpeak calls in the evening and weekend on BT Options 1, 2 and 3 (the packages which 99% of BT customers are on) to normal geographic phone numbers (the ones starting 01 or 02) so that although they will only continue to charge 5.5p per minute for the first hour of each call they will start charging 3p per minute instead of the current 1p per minute for the second and subsequent hours.

So accidentally gas away to a friend for 2 hours in the evening and the weekend with BT and the call will cost not the 5.5p you might be expecting but a cool £1.86!  BT General Manager of Pricing Policy & Design, John Strutt, has said to me on the phone that only a small percentage of calls go into this second hour.  But if this is the case then why try to impose a sneaky 200% increase in the call cost?

2. BT's Second sneaky price increase in their Update bulletin for customers is contained in the hard to understand phrase "from the 1st October 2005 the calculation for determining the call charges for selected call types will be changed from rounding up to one tenth of a penny, to rounding up to half a penny"

What this actually means is that a call that previuously cost 7.1p on your bill will now cost 7.6p and a call that cost 8.6p will now cost 9p.  This means that in pratctice on average for every phone call you make BT is likely to end up with another 0.2p per call.  It doesn't sound like much but if you make 10 calls a day then in a 90 day bill quarter it would cost you another £1.80.  So to BT the change could be worth perhaps £25 million a year or more.  Strangely Ofcom the regulator that is supposed to be ensuring greater price competitiveness by BT seems to have let this go through without a second thought.

My complaint is that as BT only bill once a quarter it is doubtful that the Update magazine they sent out for the whole quarter before 1st Oct 2005 actually contained these price rises.  Certainly I don't remember them being in the printed update that came with my bill that I did read.  Although the price changes are shown in the Update that is now on the BT website this could have been amended by BT at any time.

So it looks like BT may have sneaked through a price change that not all customers know about and to which they have given very little publicity to indeed.

It's somewhat off topic - but then maybe not! After all, as I think we all realise, BT will do almost anything to maintain their revenue stream from voice calls in the face of increasing competition from low cost providers. Their blatant misrepresentation and subsequent scam of the UK numbering scheme must be up there as one of the most hypocritical actions of a major corporation in recent years. Of course, the crooked and cynical actions of their partners-in-crime, Ofcom, have not helped.

It appears that it is not only BT that fears for its future. The spectre of VoIP looms ever larger, and US telcos are equally concerned. They don't have the luxury of a compliant and lazy public, a crooked regulator and a misrepresented numbering scheme - so they are trying other tacks instead. See this site, which explains how Sprint-Nextel have suddenly found that "they" invented VoIP after all - so '....lets sue the VoIP providers.' 

http://www.networkingpipeline.com/blog/archives/2005/10/is_voip_killing.html

I wonder if BT will try that one as well? But then, they don't need to, do they? When probably 50% of all calls are made to "revenue sharing numbers" - and you take the lion's share, regardless of how or from whom the call originated, why bother with dodgy lawsuits....!

BTW, part of me does wonder what is really behind BT's conversion to an all IP network? I cannot, I'm afraid, see it as a light on the road to Damascus! Call me cynical, but there is something far more sinister behind this.......

I just don't trust the b**tards!