qtel wrote on Nov 29
th, 2006 at 6:13pm:
You kill 0870, what do you expect to happen? Callers will now have to pay a higher cost due to meddling in the NGN market.
And how did Philips for years cope perfectly well using a London geographic number then.
The reason this is happening is because useless Ofcom has failed to come out publicly against the forcing up of ordinary phone calls that add no value into premium rate calls and has failed to force voice announcement of the call cost and revenue share to all 084/7 and 09 services. These calls are a like a disease that have totally subjugated Ofcom's fair trading duties to ensure citizen consumers pay the lowest prices for phone calls. Scammers like you qtel are just sour that your profitable little business is now being exposed. In the USA 0800 numbers are generally used for customer service qtel and yet the USA is the land of free enterprise. The UK is the land of corrupt and incomeptent regulators who fail to control and ban hidden commercial cowboy telecoms scamming.
If business could be shamed out of using these numbers by exposing them we would instead just pay a fair price for the products we buy.
Unfortunately today's yuppy £500k marketing directors don't want to support the products they sell at all. Instead they turn out low price crap that goes wrong and then try to walk away from customers. Most of it is poorly made crap that goes wrong after only 18 months, especially Philishave products.
I personally am very concerned about 09 numbers especially in a tv scam quiz show context (eg The Mint) because they cost up to £1.50 per minute and Ofcom has not enabled PIN protection against their use for the subscriber alone unless he chooses to have further PINs for other members of his household which uniquely identifies their 09 use of the line issued.