SayNoTo1890.com

Check out this RTE.ie Consumer Advice article which claims to provide you with “10 tips to help you save on your phone bill”. SayNoTo1890.com gets a mention:

Avoid non-geographic numbers

Most inclusive calls packages (such as BT Talk Plus) include all calls made to fixed (geographic) numbers, and exclude calls made to non-geographic numbers (ie 1890). If you need to call a non-geographic number, try to find out the geographic number for the business you are calling and dial that number instead. This can be obtained directly from the company itself or by visiting websites such as http://www.saynoto1890.com/ (Republic of Ireland) or www.saynoto0870.com (UK).

Most of the tips are quite useful - so the only reason I say “claims” is because I think that the original article was inspired by a BT press release - mentioned here in the Irish Independent as well. Some of the tips are really just pure advertising for BT products - such as the mention of their “Call Mobile” package.

This is the Metro article I was referring to yesterday.

Click on the image for the full size scan.

Over on my Value Ireland Blog, I take great interest in the activities of many journalists - and particularly those who may be prone to borrowing other peoples research and articles without providing credit.

I noticed yesterday that the newspaper article and customer service waiting line times I referred to below from The Sunday Times was “sort of” referenced in an article in Mondays Metro.

I say “sort of” because the Sunday Times wasn’t referenced, though the results of the research of Jan Battles was.

See here for research carried out by Paul Kelly, formerly of The Irish Examiner, who found that while Sky and Chorus/NTL (UPC) were slow, the slowest to respond were actually government departments and organisations such as ComReg and The Passport Office.

Sarah McInerney and Jan Battles
The Sunday Times, September 27th, 2008

ASAI set to call on ComReg to investigate pricing anomoly

“LO-CALL” numbers, set up by state agencies and businesses to save callers money, cost up to 49c a minute when dialled from a mobile phone.

The cost of phoning 1890, 1850 and 0818 numbers is shared by businesses, but only if the caller is on a landline. Because mobile phone operators treat these numbers as “non-standard calls”, consumers are being charged at normal rates and don’t get to use their minute allowance. As a result, it is much cheaper to call a business’s normal landline instead of the supposedly low-cost alternative.

The Advertising Standards Authority for Ireland (ASAI) is to raise the anonmaly with ComReg, the telecommunications regulator. “There is definitely an issue here of consumer knowledge, and we will be having a discussion with ComReg about it,” said Orla Twomey, its assistant chief executive.

In a bid to help mobile phone users circumvent lo-call numbers, Diarmuid MacShane, a consumer watchdog, has established Saynoto1890.com. “The 1890 numbers were set up to allow consumers call national businesses at local rates,” he said. “This works fine if you call from a landline. For example, the Eircom lo-call rate is about 5c per minute. Yet mobile phone companies are charging much more for the same call. It defeats the purpose of having a lo-call number.”

MacShane has found alternative landline numbers for the Financial Regulator, the Data Protection Commissioner and ComReg. “I’ve just managed to get a normal landline number for e-Flow,” he said.

He has also posted a list of prices charged by different mobile companies for phoning to lo-call numbers. Vodafone is the most expensive — its pre-pay customers are charged 49c per minute during peak times for a call to an 1890 number. The cost for “pay monthly” customers ranges from 18-35c.

O2 customers are charged 35c per minute for lo-call numbers, while Meteor’s are levied at 15c per minute.

Dermott Jewell, chief executive of the Consumers’ Association of Ireland, has criticised mobile phone companies’ refusal to include lo-call numbers in minute bundles. “The onus needs to come heavily on mobile providers to change their package deals,” he said. “Now that ComReg is aware of this, I would be surprised if something was not done.”

In its defence Vodafone said that “mobile offers the mobility that landline customers do not benefit from. It is important when considering value to the customer to consider the overall pricing structure rather than one price in particular”.

O2 said it charges a flat rate of 35c per minute to “ensure transparency” and the exclusion of some non-standard calls from bundled minutes on price plans is “standard industry practice”.

Meanwhile the National Consumer Agency has begun an investigation after O2 customers discovered that account upgrades they had earned had been revoked. Dozens of users found that the upgrades had disappeared when they went to use them.

The customers have been told that the eligibility criteria had changed and they need to spend more money on calls if the upgrade is to be reinstated.

One user on Talk2O2, the company’s online forum, said: “If I had been told by the customer service agent who gave me the reference number that the upgrade was only going to be valid for two weeks, I would have upgraded immediately.”

O2 said: “It is standard industry practice to review and update criteria [for mobile phone upgrades] on an ongoing basis. Such reviews result in both increased and decreased entitlements to upgrading customers depending on the time of review.”

The company said anybody who rang customer care, or was called by customer care to advise them they were eligible for an upgrade in the last 90 days, is still entitled to it. Customers entitled to an upgrade but who did nothing about it have lost out.

Coming home on the bus this evening, I heard a new advert for the Jack And Jill Foundation and their appeal for mobile phones for recycling. This time it was a “fake” Eddie Hobbs rather than the real one doing the voice over.

I’ve used the service before, and would recommend that you send on your phones if you have any old phones lying around the house.

One thing about the advert that I did notice was when they quoted their “cheap line” which was an 1850 number.

So, here’s the geographical alternative number for those who have a mobile or landline package where the call might not be so cheap:

• Jack And Jill Mobile Recycling 1850 525 545 - Call 01 8644 828

Please note, this service is actually provided by Folamh, who’s numbers these are above.

I mentioned this query to the Pricewatch section in the Irish Times from a reader that was published yesterday. This link (sub required) shows the original item on the Ireland.com website.

Stan Conroy in Dublin wrote to ask if we had noticed how many advertisers and service providers are increasingly using 1850 and 1890 “lo-call” contact numbers. “Nearly all government public services now use these numbers,” he says, and while on the surface it might seem like a good deal for consumers, it actually can work against people.

“Many telephone subscribers have Eircom or BT bundles (and there must be tens of thousands) which include ‘free’ local and national calls but with the notable exception of calls to 1850 and 1890, for which there is a charge. So for us 1850 and 1890 calls are anything but ‘lo-call’” he writes.

“1850 calls are charged at the local rate irrespective of duration while 1890 calls continue clicking up cost as the minutes go by.

“As most 1890 calls are to call centres this can build up to be significant cost. By the time you go through all the menus and then hang on for someone to answer, 10 minutes can easily go by, at a cost of about 50c, and that’s before you start to discuss your query. If you could deal with a call centre in 10 minutes that might be ok but experience tells me that it can be much longer and often means a call back to get all the information I require.

“Many of my non-public services are happy to give me a local number when I ask, for example, for AIB, BOI, Hibernian Insurance, Anglo Irish Bank.

“But State services have a reluctance or an inability to give out a local number.”

He accepts that the individual cost per call is not enormous “but the cumulative amount lining the coffers of Eircom etc must be significant”.

If anyone knows Stan Conroy, let him know this site is here

From Eddie Lennon in the Money Talks section in The Sunday Tribune, May 18th, 2008

Tip of the Week

Phone users are being ripped off when the ake calls to government departments and large companies via 1850, 1890 and 0818 numbers. While mobile users who pay by bill have a block of “free” minutes credited to their phone each month, these minutes include standard land line and mobile numbers, but usually not other numbers.

Dialling these numbers can cost up to 49c per minute when calling from a mobile, and up to 8c a minute from a land line. Last week, the consumer awareness website ValueIreland.com published a useful list of land line numbers which you can contact as a cheaper alternative to the more expensive numbers. The list is available at www.SayNoTo1890.com.