Well its quite clearly a case of Never Say Never with Freesat it would appear as at long, long last and after several years of conversations with this call centre (once every year or two) I was today (Jan 7th 2014) given an official 0800 alternative number for contacting the Freesat Customer Contact Centre, previously always only reachable directly for all of its opening hours on the 0845 number.

This new official 0800 alternative number for contacting the Freesat call centre (for the small number of eccentrics amongst us who for some odd reason hate paying up to 40p per minute to call 0845 on a mobile) is 0800 840 1003

This number goes straight through to the first available adviser in the Freesat call centre and completely avoids their annoying IVR menu with the usual revenue generating menu choices and subsequent wait on hold to get through.

It also seems remarkable that an organisation who's whole marketing proposition is selling FTA Only satellite services to people who detest paying Sky subscriptions has made it so hard to avoid their 0845 number for so long.

Hopefully this new 0800 number for calling their contact centre will now relieve the poor lady on the Freesat switchboard in London from having to manually patch through calls to the call centre from the 020 number during daytime office hours.  Incredibly to this day it still sadly remains the case that if you select the IVR menu option offered on the Freesat HQ 020 number for customer services you are then immediately told to redial the 0845 number before being automatically cut off.

I have also fully tested this number as working so hope that Dave may soon be able to promote this new 0800 number for the Freesat Contact Centre to the verified section of the listings.

Freesat does not list the 0800 number on its website as I presume it is probably only usually given out to people such as Freesat retailers etc who have presumably expressed their repeated displeasure at having to pay a covert premium rate number in order to better advise potential customers on the product.

Along with Freesat Freetime now also finally offering all four UK On Demand Terrestrial players (BBC IPlayer, ITV Player, 4OD and Demand 5), making it at least start to begin to compare with Youview, this seems to offer some hope that the management of Freesat are now finally becoming more customer focused than has appeared to be the case over the last several years.