I was amazed to come across the following recent article by Mark Guy, Public Relations Officer of Windsor Telecom

See http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Time-For-03-is-Now&id=1218904

This article is basically well written, fairly intelligent in its approach and does not contain any very deliberately misleading information.  Except that for some strange reason it does not mention 0845 numbers as being amongst the numbers that most people dislike (indeed instead it even mentions 0845 in the same breath as 0800) hate and want to avoid and instead only pans 0870 and 0844 numbers as distrusted and now past their sell by date.

Of course the cynic in me can't help but feel that the only real reason Windsor Telecom is actually now prepared to describe 03 numbers as "clean and ethical" is because there is still money to be made on them by Windsor Telecom, but this time in ripping off the call centre operators by trying to persuade them they are better off with one of these numbers than a nice old fashion 01/02 phone number or even a Voip 01/02 number.

At the end of the day the ripoff of large amounts of money going to mediocre middle men like Windsor Telecom remains but it is now simply hitting all consumers collectively in the pocket by artificially driving up the price of all goods and service from the company concerned (due to the total ripoff telecoms costs for receiving all calls on an 03 number for the company) rather than unfairly penalising only some individual consumers who had experienced especially bad service with a company that they needed to get resolved.

So my conclusion is that Windsor Telecom are not really reformed at all but are now finally prepared to admit 0870 and 0844 were a ripoff (something they never ever admitted when they previously sold them) in order to try and foist on businesses the new ripoff of 03 numbers on which Windsor Telecom will now earn lots more ill gotten and undeserved profits.