NGMsGhost wrote on Sep 19
th, 2007 at 7:22pm:
Interesting how the icons used for the number ranges are the same as those at
www.dmclub.co.ukDo you suppose the two organisations are by any chance in some way related.
The first is reselling the second, and not concealing the fact, as a click on the page would show
NGMsGhost wrote on Sep 19
th, 2007 at 7:40pm:
Helen01 wrote on Sep 18
th, 2007 at 3:49pm:
These seem to be under-reported yet they are easily confused with mobile numbers. I inadvertently called one and was charged 68p for 19 secs. Does anyone have any more info about them?
Helen,
The 070 "Personal Number"range is another example of the massive failure by the UK telecoms regulator Ofcom, [...]
070 numbers are clearly in reality a form of 09 premium rate number since they are charged at up to 50p per minute on a landline and heaven knows how much more on a mobile where some operators seem to think they can multiply the landline charge to a Personal Number by 3, [...]
I'm afraid it gets worse as there are now companies like
www.united-mobile.com who offer you a SIM card for your mobile with a +44 79 number that looks just like a UK mobile and that they sell as being a UK mobile number on the basis that you can receive calls with no incoming fee in loads of countries around the EU and the rest of the world. But what they don't tell you is that the number is actually a Jersey mobile number so that if you use the number in the UK your friends will find calls to you are not in their bundled mobile minutes and are costing up to 50p or so a minute for a call they might think they were making out of their 750 minutes a month or whatever. Again it is a disgrace that the regulator Ofcom does not force Jersey to have its own separate country code (as they do fro car registrations and even internet domains) and even if they are to allow a +44 mobile number they should have used un unallocated number range prefix like 04 or 06 so no one could possibly think they were calling a normal UK mobile.
It's mostly history, rather than calculated rip-off, that has been overlooked for much too long now. When 070 numbers first launched, they were about the same 50 pence a minute as mobile calls, but they've been stuck in a time warp ever since.
In fact, I'm told there were mobile contracts available that still included them even as recently as under 3 years ago, though this was unknown to the network in question and an oversight carried through from earlier. I've heard of 50p though, rather than 3 times that as suggested, but I'm not doing any tests, and quite a few of them are actually barred anyway.
There isn't supposed to be revenue sharing, but anyone claiming that for Patientline would probably find themself confined.
__
As for the complete veer off-topic ...
Sorry, but complaining about United Mobile is over the top, and doesn't really belong on this forum. For nearly 3 years they've had free incoming roaming in plenty of countries, and much lower outgoing charges, and you've presumably taken plenty of advantage.
It's hardly their fault what the UK networks charge in proportion to the actual wholesale rates. It does come from some inclusive minutes. There are quite a few other UK mobile prefixes that the same questions apply to, but getting info from customer services is certainly difficult, and one or two aspects of the large companies' behaviour look unattractive.
But, NGM, as you'll know more about the tariffs available than the perhaps less phone-savvy people you'll give your number to, surely it would be quite sociable for you to tell those friends that it won't come from their inclusive minutes, or even set up for yourself the kind of call diversion you would presumably have had for the Liechtenstein number. As you could call home for pennies a minute, it won't be a hardship to incur that for incoming call diversions as well.
As for the suggestion that it's a disgrace that Jersey isn't a separate country for telecoms purposes ....... the best moment has gone, but perhaps +444 Guernsey, +445 Jersey, +446 Isle of Man could have been done quite easily when the rest of us had the leading 1s added or changed to 2something, conveniently even including the then existing landline allocations and allowing plenty of expansion for mobiles
If Jersey were totally split off now with a totally new country code as you seem to suggest, their landlines would be out of range of much of the world for a while, hundreds of thousands of these SIMs might be redundant, and the best mobile rates might quite possibly soon have a run on them like other small countries - have you not noticed what has been happening to termination fees for Liechtenstein recently? AND, then they would certainly never come out of UK's inclusive minutes, whereas at the moment there is scope.
If you won't invest a fraction of your time explaining the product's benefits to people who have little idea what this bit was about, and telling people how to use it or call to it cheaply, instead of moaning off-target in this instance at Ofcom rather than the main UK mobile networks, then please leave it for the people who do want to use it.