UK providers of telecommunications services are required to register with Ofcom and comply with its regulations.

Without the benefit of a crystal ball, the shape of a pyramid appears before my eyes. As always, those near the top do very well. If you have enough contacts (or friends you do not need to keep) or can attract enough people to call your 0800 number to buy into this, then you also may do well.

Please forgive the fact that my moral scruples prevent me from wishing you well if you pursue this venture.


You may have seen a recently repeated edition of "Dragon's Den" where an applicant began a pitch about a directory of 0800 numbers with the suggestion that businesses with 0800 numbers were bound to be seen as more attractive by other businesses. As I recall, he was dismissed with the suggestion that use of a 0800 number by an otherwise unknown business to attract new customers is an indication of something dodgy.

I can see the logic and tend to agree.

More generally, any marketing that includes the word "free", or any such reference, is to be viewed with extreme suspicion.

semmyroundel wrote on Sep 7^th, 2008 at 10:44pm:

I think Freud took over as you started typing this new thread - the first word you used was 'unbelievable'.

I notice also that you used the word 'allegedly' - so you're obviously highly suspicious of what you spent and persuaded your friends to spend £150 on.

The question which springs to mind for me is, "Whose life?"  Is it your life? (if so, how can the seller be sure to live as long as you?), is it the life of the seller? (if so, how do you know how long he or she will live?) or is it the life of the seller's company? (in which case, what's to stop him or her closing the business today or tomorrow?).

www.call08.com give you an 0800 number with 1000 included incoming minutes for £4.95 per month + VAT.  Once those are exceeded they charge 2p per minute (I'm not sure how much your provider charges if you run over the 1,000 free minutes per month).

So you seem to need the service you have paid for to still be in business in 31 months time (31 x 4.95 = £153.45) to be ahead of paying monthly with www.call08.com

Perhaps this is a new 0800 call vending business and typically they offer these Lifetime type packages (I have one on an advanced tv hard drive recorder called a Tivo that had a £10 per month sub or a £200 for "Lifetime" service option back in 2002 that I am now quids on after 70 months of Lifetime service for £200) in order to get cash in the door to help start up their business.  Later if they are successful they will only sell on the www.call08.com basis of a monthly fee.  Clearly if they sell too many of these lifetime 0800 deals and then don't get enough monthly paying customers later on they could go belly up and your lifetime 0800 number is then worth nothing.  In effect its something of a gamble.  You could end up very handsomely in profit compared to a www.call08.com deal after 5 years and there again you might not.

Don't forget that with more and more people switching to contract mobiles and then eventually calls on the internet via voip our useless regulator Ofcom has seen to it that calls via those means to 0800 numbers are not free.  I am sure calls to 0800 numbers from ordinary landlines and BT Payphones will remain free but both means of making calls are in decline so ultimately the number of incoming 0800 call minutes per month you receive will gradually decline with the passage of time.

On the other hand if you run a business from home and also give all your friends and family the 0800 number you can clearly do everything possible to maximise the number of incoming 0800 call minutes per months you receive.

It all depends how long the firm you bought the number from stays in business for at the end of the day...............................

As to Ofcom and them not knowing too much about your issue sadly that is an all too typical description of almost of any form of interaction between the general public and the bored, clueless and telecoms disinterested staff who Ofcom have employed to work in their so called Contact Centre.  What a pity that the telecoms regulator seems to find communication to be such a difficult art to master.

semmyroundel wrote on Sep 16^th, 2008 at 10:28am:


As calling 0800 numbers from mobiles is usually not actually free but instead usually excluded from bundled minutes and charged at a premium penal rate and as a similar problem arises from overseas on both mobiles and landlines in any of your advertising you should be quoting both your 0800 number and your underlying geographic number (probably in the format +44 1xxx xxxxxx although no real harm if you quote it just as 01xxx xxxxxxx) and then people can call the 0800 number on a landline and the normal geographic number from their mobile.  If the 0800 number ever stops working for some reason they can then call your normal number instead.

One obvious point is that more and more people on landlines have inclusive call packages with unlimited calls at all times or certain times to landlines so that the value to many potential customers of you having an 0800 phone number rather than a regular 01/02 phone number is slowly reducing.  Obviously what you should not have is an 084 or 087 number which costs everybody far more to call.

I disagree with those above who suggested that they saw companies with 0800 numbers as in some way dodgy or desperate for business.  Instead I always see them as pro customer and putting the customer first and always try to deal with companies who use 0800 numbers for sales in preference to those who do not.

Even if your current 0800 number provider ever went bust under Ofcom's non geographic number portability arrangement you should still be able to move the number to another telecoms provider.

Dave wrote on Sep 16^th, 2008 at 8:11pm:


I presume that if a network operator goes out of business there is some kind of contingency position for Ofcom to release the numbers to another operator.  How else would all those NEG doctors surgeries etc, etc carry on tomorrow if we found that NEG had gone in to administration?

jgxenite wrote on Sep 17^th, 2008 at 12:48am:


Yes one hopes so but it wouldn't happen overnight and meanwhile every leaflet and phone book entry will still be showing the old 0844 number.

The point is that it must have happened that a telecoms operator has gone bust and there must be a way for the users of the numbers to still carry on using them or we would have heard about this problem by now.

SilentCallsVictim wrote on Sep 17^th, 2008 at 1:10am:


Surely the administrators/receivers might sell the right to collect the debt under the contract to another party as it would clearly have a value to it?

And aren't you supposed to be in bed by now SCV?