Dave wrote on Feb 12^th, 2014 at 12:27am:


So in other words there is absolutely zero moral excuse for Tesco and/or O2 (Tesco Mobile is a 50/50 joint venture between the two) not allowing calls to be made to 0800 numbers out of a caller's bundled minutes on a Contract Mobile, even if they may have a slight argument that they can reasonably charge calls to 0800 on Pay As You Go phones at the same rate as an ordinary call to an 01/02/03 number until such time as Ofcom mandates otherwise.  They charge 20p per minute to contract customers with remaining bundled free minutes purely because they think they can get away with it and even though connecting a call to an 0800 number is a lower cost action for them than connecting a call to an 01/02/03 number.

Quote:


I regard the matter as urgent purely because of the very large number of daily callers to Tesco's online grocery shopping service and because of the fact that Tesco Mobile itself fails to warn customers not just that calls to 0800 numbers are not "Free" but also that they are not even covered by a caller's bundled minutes package that does cover 01/02/03 numbers.

We all know the huge amount of effort you personally put in to this site Dave but equally we also know that you prefer to retain almost total control of it and not to share the burden of the work involved with other long term members of this forum.  For instance in relation to the Geographic Requests you could long ago have broken up the work of responding to posts and making changes to the database say A-D, E-H, I-L etc across different established forum members who were willing to volunteer.

You and the owner of the site choose not to do this so sadly this means all the work falls on you but nonetheless some of the rest of us who have passionate feelings on this subject do not like to see customers continue to be encouraged to call a well used number that will cost them significant money (20p per minute or more) from a mobile when a call bundle inclusive alternative number (03s not strictly speaking being geographic numbers) is available.

I also note that I once again did not receive a post update email for this thread despite being subscribed to it even though I do receive some post update emails from this forum.  This is despite whitelisting saynoto0870.com with my ISP's spam filtering service.

I have also written jointly to the CEO's of both Tesco and O2 (given that Tesco Mobile is a 50/50 joint venture) both drawing their attention to my disquiet over their failure to take 0800 calls out of a customer's bundled minutes package and specifically stressing the need to urgently complete the corporate migration of the Tesco brand to only using 03 prefixed phone numbers by changing the remaining 084 customer service and other similar related numbers still in use by Tesco Mobile for calls from landlines (they provide a free number for calling them from a Tesco Mobile - at least for contract customers they do anyway) over to an 03 prefix

NGMsGhost wrote on Feb 12^th, 2014 at 3:55pm:

That is excellent news, and good communications. After very many years of hard work (which I joined relatively recently) the message is at last being understood widely.

It is deeply frustrating that it has taken so long, and full implementation will take longer still, with some exceptions likely to continue, perhaps for ever. It is however wonderful to read postings such as the above in this forum.