How does that affect Onetel's cable customers, who don't qualify for carrier preselection or line rental? And will this mean we'll no longer have to talk to Indian call centre staff who use fifteen words when they only need to use three (and then repeat themselves)? After offshoring, Onetel had the cheek to replace its 0800 number with an 0845 one - I started using their London one instead.

jamesbond wrote on Oct 22^nd, 2006 at 12:41pm:
So what are your plans now?

telcoman wrote on Oct 22^nd, 2006 at 2:32pm:
TalkTalk only support BT customers (as do most other teleco's) so I think you're stuck with paying cable prices (they are THE most expensive out of all the other landline providers including BT) or moving to BT (recommended) and using one the many other providers available to you.

Don't forget to see Cheap Call Provider for Cable customers thread.  In fact, I plan on updating that sometime this week.

jamesbond wrote on Oct 22^nd, 2006 at 10:00pm:


Why Superline?.

Their CPS packages are some of the most expensive around and their Intl and Mobile Calls are expensive plus  their charges to call 0845/0870 are extortinate. 0845 peak 6p a min. 0870 peak 11p a minute.

jamesbond wrote on Oct 22^nd, 2006 at 10:00pm:
Did you check out Phone.coop because during the evening & weekends you only pay 4.7 per call (geographical numbers only obviously).  This is cheapest now I think for those unfortunate enough to have a cable landline.  As I said I plan on updating my Cheap Call Provider - Cable landline to mention this.

Thanks to Orsonkart for pointing this out.

bbb_uk wrote on Oct 23^rd, 2006 at 9:18pm:


This sounds worth investigating. I'd been using Onetel's StandardUKTalk which gives you an hour for 5p for weekends and evenings. I'm still signed up for this, though the above comments suggest that it may be taken away soon. And Telewest's £11 rental package includes free weekend calls, so obviously it's best to use them at weekends.

The problem for me was 1899's steady increase in charges over the past year, so that even just for day time use a minimum 5p per call was becoming too much (4p connection plus 1p per minute rounded up to the nearest minute ie. one second charged as one minute).

So it certainly looks worth the effort to switch to BT (unless you have to pay a £125 installation charge). I was about to do this until Telewest offered me enough discount that I'd have lost money making the switch. But I'll be thinking again about taking action on switching when the discounts run out.