SayNoTo1890.com

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.

This is the contents of a letter that was sent to, and published by, the Consumer Association of Ireland in their Consumer Choice magazine. It highlights the frustrations concerned when we’re being forced to spend extra money calling companies and government organisations through their use of 1850 and 1890 numbers.

My issue is that most of the telephone providers now offer packages where we pay a single fee for line rental and calls where calls are being made to another landline. However, many businesses and government departments elected to provide a Locall number for clients so that we would only incur a local call charge when we made contact with them. This is fine if a telephone subscriber is paying for each individual call. I and many others, however, pay an additional charge to call Locall numbers as Locall is a premium rate service.

For example, my monthly service charge for all calls 24/7 for any single call with a duration of less than 59 minutes to landlines in Ireland, Northern Ireland and the UK, along with Broadband and line rental, is about €50 per month. If, during the month, I call a business using the regular landline, this call will be included in my monthly subscription; if, however, I call using the Locall number, then there would be an additional charge on my next bill. Unfortunately, not all businesses and offices provide the normal landline number in addition to the Locall number.

I, like other subscribers with similar packages, am being asked to pay an additional charge for a phone call that should have been included in the Telephone Service Package because businesses are only supplying Premium Rate Numbers. This is most unfair to consumers.

We’d love to get your comments and feedback on this site. And if you either know of some geographical alternative numbers that you’d like to share with everyone, or if there’s a particular number you’d like us to try to follow up and find for you, please e-mail us here info@saynoto1890.com.

I was pleased to read the article re “say no to 1890″ in the back of the Tribune Business section yesterday as this is something that has irritated me for some time. The issue does not only apply to mobile packages, but also to landline tariff packages. I’m on an all-in package for landline calls from Perlico, where all local and national landline calls under an hour are not charged separately from the monthly amount. However, this does not include the increasing no of 1890 no’s and to a lesser extent, the 1850 no’s. The same packages from Eircom, O2, Smart and probably others also apply the same rules, procedures and landline charges for 1890.

I have sometimes tried to get the landline no from some telephonists of the various 1890 places, to no avail, and I am highly surprised that this issue has not been taken up by the Consumer Assoc of Ireland. I also would have expected that some journalists would have written a few articles at this stage to publicise the issue - similarly to the periodic articles on petrol prices at different garages. 1890 is fine with me as long as people are given a choice. However, not only are people not given a choice, but it would appear that some organisations conceal their main landline no’s by ommission from phonebooks and also headed notepaper.

To be fair, the first journalist to write about this was Paul Kelly in the Irish Examiner. And today, Conor Pope in the Irish Times Pricewatch has printed a readers letter about the same issue. I believe also there was a letter written to the Consumer Association of Ireland Consumer Choice magazine in the last number of months also.