bigjohn wrote on Sep 9
th, 2013 at 3:18am:
I have noticed following BT,s examples other suppliers have started to increase cost of landline calls to mobiles.
EG:Talk Talk increase them to 12p a minute from 1/10/13 with a 15p call connection fee.
http://sales.talktalk.co.uk/pricing/info/pricing-notificationBut Talk Talk offer a half decent boost of 1000 landline to mobile minutes for £5 a month.
As with non-geographic numbers, such as 0844, in the past, TalkTalk is seen to copy BT in some of its mobile rates.
Unlike BT, it has only two phone packages:
Talk UK Evening & Weekend and
Talk UK Anytime; these are £4.61 and £7.21, respectively, plus the cost of line rental.
Talk UK Weekend is no longer available, so if TalkTalk's Evening & Weekend plan is its most basic and it costs more than the "line rental", is it possible to have just line rental and if so what are the call rates? The fact that the Weekend plan is no longer available suggests that one has to pay line rental plus at least £4.61 for a package. Is this understanding right?
The cost of calling mobiles with both packages is the same as with BT's
old rates: 11.3 pence per minute during the daytime and 5.3 pence per minute during the evening, plus a call connection charge of 13.87 pence.
TalkTalk offers the
Mobile Extra add-on for £1.49 which makes calls to mobiles 7.15 pence per minute at all times (plus 13.87 pence connection). This is available to subscribers on both the Evening & Weekend and Anytime plans.
The point is that BT offered a similar add-on - Anytime Plus - but only for its Anytime plan. It (the "Plus" bit) cost £1.85 with half call rate mobile calls. Unlike TalkTalk there was no add-on for the BT Evening & Weekend package, and TalkTalk offers no Weekend plan.
As bigjohn says, TalkTalk do add-ons that offer a finite number of call minutes. There is the
100 Mobile Minutes Boost for £3 and the
1000 Mobile Minutes Boost for £5.
The
TalkTalk changes of 1st October 2013 will see the Anytime plan fall from £7.21 to £5.50 (have I got that right? It's quite a drop!). Call rates of UK non-geographic numbers will increase. For example, 0844 g6 will increase from 6.62 pence per minute to 7.62 pence per minute. BT's rates for g6 numbers are held by regulation at 5.105 pence per minute. The call connection fee follows BT from 13.87 pence to 15 pence.
The main topic of this thread is mobile rates and TalkTalk's will go from (daytime) 11.3 and (evening) 5.3 pence per minute (as BT's old) to 12 pence per minute at all times (as BT's new).There is no indication about what will happen to Mobile Extra. If it remains as it is then it will offer mobile rates at just over half regular call rate.