Yes, this certainly complicates things.

BT Basic customers can now benefit from free calls to UK mobiles within their £10/month unlimited allowance. But it's not clear whether "Line Only Discount" customers can add the 500 Minutes or Unlimited plans to their £11.99 a month. If they can, they'd be getting a great deal (either £16.99 or £26.99 a month), and presumably could add Line Rental Plus for an extra £2 to get the Calling Features Pack as well as exchange-controlled "International and Premium Rate Call Barring" that are included within Home Phone Saver for £21.99 a month. In which case, Home Phone Saver's days might be numbered. (Annoyingly, however, HPS gives Anonymous Call Reject while LRP gives Choose to Refuse. Would be better if LRP offered both.)

No longer including weekend calls to landlines in the cheapest (£19.99 a month) 'plan' is a disgrace. It's also irritating that calls to the Channel Islands are still treated as international calls, especially as the dialling codes resemble those of the UK. I don't believe outgoing calls to the Channel Islands can be blocked, for that reason.

One discrepancy I noticed between the tariff guide and the website is that the 'Unlimited Minutes' plan is listed as £15 a month in the former, but on the latter is quoted as being £12 more than standard line rental.

It may be worth considering providers that charge all calls on a pence per minute basis:

	Line rental	Geo/03 day	Geo/03 E&W	Mobile	Calling features
CIX	£13.00	1.20ppm	1.20ppm	6.00ppm	£1.32
Uno Communications	£14.39	1.76ppm	0.98ppm	3.97ppm	£0.72

Both these services offer Openreach Wholesale Line Rental (WLR3), the exact same service that the retail part of BT offers, with their own first-line support. They can do this and turn a profit, which is why the figures are worth looking at, being as we don't know what the wholesale call charges are for WLR3.

These services are on rolling monthly contracts, with no minimum term. The 'rolling monthly contract' basically means you pay on a monthly basis and if you cancel or migrate away part way through the month you don't get any refund.

If anyone knows of other providers that charge like this then please let me know.

With respect to calling features, most are the price quoted. There might be exceptions, but this is useful as a guide. When Openreach allowed access to its price list (without having to have an account to sign in on the site) the cost of calling features was an astounding 36p (ex. VAT). This was a year or two ago, and the price had gone up from 24p. Now we see how BT can do Line Rental Plus, which includes a load of features, for 'only' £2 per month. To be fair to BT, I think this is a reasonable charge. To pay £12.75 for 5+ calling features is extortion.

Neither of these two providers gives pricing for calls to the Channel Islands, so we don't know whether such calls are treated as UK geographic ones or not. The Channel Islands also don't appear on the list of international destinations (for both providers).


When you look at the charges here, you really see how eye-watering BT's are. Inclusive plans, certainly with BT's charges, haven't really been giving anything, generally.

The principal exception is for people who make many minutes of calls (high users). But people are tending away from using the phone, especially landlines, are they not. This means we are tending away from getting value out of such packages.

If we wish to argue that inclusive plans are good because it means people know how much they will pay, then this is true, to a point. It is (was) true providing they don't go over the hour, and it is true but at what true cost?!

Clearly, the main thing is that the mainstream providers, along with what I shall term mainstream outliers (e.g. The Phone Co-op, Utility Warehouse and Post Office Home Phone), all use the inclusive call plan model, and this is the reason it is so common.

If BT avails punters of 20 pence per minute – billed in whole-minute increments – then how come these can do it for a tiny fraction with per second billing?