Change your mobile provider floella2, you are being ripped off.

0844 & 0845 & 0870 numbers are 25 pence per minute on pay as you go and 20 pence on monthly. with o2

floella2 wrote on Jun 27^th, 2009 at 8:59pm:

Your other option is to use a provider like 18185 for 0845 numbers from your mobile. They provide a geographical number, so you call that and you pay for that call to your mobile provider (or from inclusive minutes where applicable) and then charged 5p plus 3ppm by 18185.

There are alternatives for the DVLA, most police forces, banks and insurance companies in the database.

It seems that ShortSighted's myopia blinds him or her to any other point of view than that a nice revenue stream he/she was used to  will now be stopped and they are not interested in the fact that all 084/7 calls have been based on a history of deliberate fraudulent misselling to the consumer that they are Local Rate or National Rate when they are not.

If these revenue share calls could only ever have been introduced in the form of 09 calls so the consumer realised they involved paying the called company extra then none of the call centres would ever have dared introduce them in the first place.

It is the deliberate hiding of a charge and using this to cross subsidise other aspect of call centre activities to which we object and yes I would much rather pay more for my insurance premium while only paying a normal rate phone call for any subsequent claims or administration arising as a result of being a policy holder.

It seems that utterly stunned by his post not being removed from the forum that ShortSighted now has nothing more to say.

bikeman wrote on Jul 25^th, 2009 at 1:06pm:

This is a good suggestion, albeit a clumsy name.

It will be necessary to confirm that (as with the other points made) it is the claim of "freephone" that is the problem.

I am not aware of anyone who has clearly stated a desire to pick up the cost of calls from all sources, including mobiles. That is perhaps why there is no standard arrangement with a reserved range of numbers that offer this feature. It is reasonable to assume that if sufficient representations had been made to Ofcom to provide such a range, then it would have been provided.

The proposed website could perhaps aim to gather together those who wanted such a facility, so as to make strong representations to Ofcom on this point.

To avoid being short sighted, campaigning on this issue needs to be handled with some care so as not to undermine two existing features. Firstly, the fact that some would withdraw their "freephone" facility if compelled to meet the cost of calling them from mobiles also. Secondly, the mobile operators waive their charges on calls to "helplines", under an arrangement brokered by the Telephone Helplines Association. They are also known to have extended this arrangement to other numbers, such as the National Pandemic Flu Service. These arrangements are purely voluntary and not universally applicable.

If one were content for these facilities to be lost for the sake of a coherent prinicple, that would be a valid position to take. To address the concerns of the OP however, one must approach this issue with an awareness of the implications.

(The wider question of how the costs of mobile telephony are distributed between purchase price, rental and call charges is a quite separate issue, although changes could provide a resolution to the particular issue.)