bigjohn wrote on Jan 20^th, 2006 at 4:16pm:


But this isn't the MSE forum now is it Big John?

Just a reminder before Uncle Dave perhaps makes the same suggestion via editorial intervention.

As to 3U the poor little souls have merely been so stung by what they lost on 0870 that they are now trying to get it back.  Perhaps when they have made up their loss they wil move to charging 7.51p per minute or whatever.

Being based in Germany (where all customer service calls went) they were obviously as taken in as the rest of the great British public that 0870 was National Rate.

bigjohn wrote on Jan 20^th, 2006 at 11:59pm:


For some time 3u were offering calls to 0870 at the same price as their other national calls on their website - that is 2p per minute at any time.  Several phone calls and emails from members of this forum confirmed that  this was indeed the correct rate - so its not as though we didn't give them a chance to spot their own stupidity.

Their service works via indirect access like 1899 et al but when trying to become a customer I was much offput by their demand for me to print out sign and fax back the form from their website and also to accompany it with a copy of my last BT bill.  The final thing that ensured I did not sign up with them was no means to pay their bills by Direct Debit but instead a suggestion either that one had to post a cheque every month or that one could set up their details in one's online banking and make a manual payment every month.  However knowing how useless I am with manual bill payment I concluded that this would cost me more money than it would save and so gave up on the 2p per minute 3u 0870 rate.  It also seemed obvious their pricing was based on ignorance rather than astuteness of the Finarea kind so it clearly would not continue.

I can't think of any reason for the silly pricing on 0870 calls now other than trying to get back the money they lost before.

Ama wrote on Jan 21^st, 2006 at 11:27am:


What indeed is the point of Ofcom and its overpaid senior management gravy train when it seems incapable of carrying out the legislative requirements imposed on it under Section 3(1) of the Communications Act 2003 that say its primary mission is to protect the best interests of the uk citizen and the uk consumer?

Unfortunately Ofcom prefers to pay more attention to section 6 of the Communications Act 2003 which says that it should not regulate or intervene unnecessarily in the activities of business or the marketplace.

The discussion about 3U telecom was mentioned at the time, when they discovered that terminating all the 0870 calls was too expensive, and their lack of understanding of our systems, and they made a knee jerk reaction to raise the prices so high, that nobody in their right mind would make such a call.

Also, remember their customer base.  The amount of effort required to open an account meant that the only people who would become customers would be astute moneysavers who spotted the 0870 loophole, who would also be the first to stop using the service once the loophole is closed.

If their sense of logic is actually thinking that raising the prices because these numbers are so popular so they need to recoup the money lost and then make a profit, they are mistaken.  They might have decided that they don't want to carry these calls anymore, so priced it so high, nobody will use them for that particular type of call.  Other telcos using prefix codes do refuse to take these calls, rather than price themselves so high nobody would use them anyway.

Of course mobile companies can charge these kind of rates but if you've only got a mobile with you and you're out, then you have no choice if the call is urgent.  On the landline it's easy to just route the call with BT who can't charge more than the going rate for the call.

I meant it's easy to route the call with BT, who charge less than most indirect access providers, and cannot charge more than the 0870 going rate (which is certainly not the going rate for normal calls)

And yes, I do know that Finarea, and a few others do charge less than BT, but for a Mr or Mrs Average (not astute moneysavers like we have on this site) they wouldn't sign up to the likes of Finarea or 3U in the first place, but might have been able to be persuaded to go via somewhere like Talk Talk, or Homecall from a salesman or from a friend who tells them they can call them free if they become a customer as well, but many would have stuck with BT.

Now these kind of people may then have enough sense to route their 0870 calls through BT, but of course in the case of NGN, myself and others on the site, we would do our best to avoid using the 0870 number in the first place.

I certainly didn't mean to refer to 0870 as a going rate or anything like that!!

As for 3U, I agree they do seem totally useless.  I'm just curious to discover their sense of logic in all this.  Someone at director level in Germany, is being paid a vast amount of money to make these kinds of decisions about customer service, payment methods, call rates etc, and it doesn't take a genius to know that they've messed up big time!!  People and companies don't always get things right, but surely 3U should be learning from their mistakes, instead of making even more bad decisions!!

Or perhaps they are a large successful company in Germany, and other countries and their operations in the UK are so small that it doesn't make a big enough dent in company profits to worry them, and the incompetent director who is accountable just blags his way out of it by saying the losses are down to the cost of setting up, but things are going to improve soon.

Looks like they have gone down The Swanee .See this post on Google Groups.
http://groups.google.com/group/uk.telecom/browse_thread/thread/ed16fd1ece804b4a/...