SilentCallsVictim wrote on Sep 20
th, 2010 at 10:00pm:
The basic fact which emerges from the nonsense littering this piece is that call charges for normal calls are becoming a thing of the past. The minority (34% in the case of BT) who pay for calls to landlines are incurring penalty charges. I hope that this article will help more to recognise this so that the percentages can be reduced.
The standard cost of a landline call to a geographic number, to be used when comparing with that for a 0845 or 0844 number, is 0p.
Indeed it is.
The same thing exists with mobile tariffs that have finite inclusive minutes. The cost of minutes in excess of those bundled are high and on a par with that for pay as you go tariffs.
The reason is the same. If extra call minutes weren't as expensive, then there would be less incentive to drive subscribers onto more expensive tariffs with greater volumes of inclusive minutes.
Trenod wrote on Sep 23
rd, 2010 at 12:54am:
One significant BT price increase that the Mail doesn't mention is the 20p hike in the payphone minimum fee in June. Before then, 40p gave you a 20-minute call (equal to 2p a minute). Now the minimum amount you have to put in is 60p, which gives you up to 30 minutes. That's still only the equivalent of 2p a minute, which is an absolute bargain compared to the daytime rates of all landline and mobile phone providers, and every 15 minutes thereafter will set you back a mere 10p (about 0.67p a minute) - but come on, who on earth wants to stand in a drafty, noisy phonebox for half an hour? Most people who still use payphones only do so for short, organisational calls (e.g. "Hi Dad, can you come and pick me up from the station please?") - not social ones! If your call is only likely to last a few minutes, it's cheaper to use your mobile. How's that going to encourage people to use the payphones? The increases have been rapid and startling... From decimalisation in 1971 until 1984, the minimum call fee was 2p. From 1984 to 2000 it remained a reassuringly low 10p. But since 2000 it's gone up no less than FOUR times, in direct response to the rise in mobile phone usage: up to 20p in 2000, 30p in 2004, 40p in 2006 and a whopping 60p in 2010! Now I fully appreciate that BT has been making a big loss on payphones since mobiles became popular a decade ago, but putting the minimum call charge up to extortionate levels is really not the answer, as it will just drive people away from payphones and towards their mobiles! It's a Catch-22 situation!! The best solution would be for that old dog with no teeth, Ofcom, to realise that it is simply no longer fair or even acceptable, in this age of competition and deregulation, for ONE provider (privatised as long as 26 years ago) to have to provide an ailing public service largely by itself. ALL the major telephone providers - landline and mobile - should be required to share the burden, by paying an annual fee to BT towards the upkeep of the national payphone service.
I agree with you here, although I don't believe that the cost of payphones will drive people to use mobiles. That suggests that you think that if payphones were cheaper than mobiles, that people would really use them instead of dipping their hand in their pocket for their mobile phone.
At the end of the day, public payphones are undoubtedly a public service that are unprofitable for any private organisation, apart from where BT's competitors have cherry-picked there locations, such as in busy train stations and bustling shopping streets.
Trenod wrote on Sep 23
rd, 2010 at 12:54am:
… I can make exactly the same call on my Pay as You Go mobile phone (on the Vodafone Smartstep tariff of 30p per minute for the first 3 minutes and 5p per minute thereafter) for a mere 22p more (£2.25)!!! Vodafone no longer offers Smartstep for new supply, but even with the flat-rate 8p per minute rates of Asda, Tesco and giffgaff (currently the cheapest PAYG rates on the market), such a call only comes to £2.40 (just 37p more than with BT). And, unlike BT, they don't charge a premium for calls to other mobiles! …
But unlike BT, they do charge a premium for calling landlines and don't offer discounts for connecting calls to mobiles on their own networks (for which they don't incur termination charges).
SilentCallsVictim wrote on Sep 23
rd, 2010 at 7:49am:
The important point to remember however, especially when making comparisons with the cost of calling revenue sharing numbers, is that the rates charged for normally inclusive calls are PENALTY rates imposed on those who select a call plan to cover one period and then make calls at another time.
We must get away from the idea that these rates are the standard BT call charges - they are not.
One reason for the abolition of the BT Standard tariff was because when BT's competitors made comparisons, they did so with it and not BT's main tariffs, set-up to compete in the open market. (BT Standard was essentially the "pre-competition" tariff.)