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.

There’s been lots of people coming to this site recently looking for the costs of calling various customer service 190* numbers. I wasn’t sure what they all meant, so I did some checking. Here is the listing for the companies to which these numbers are allocated.

The theory behind these numbers is that they’re free for the customers of the networks themselves. So, for me, 1909 is free when I call from my mobile. Unsurprisingly I suppose, there is no information on the O2 website on how much it might cost me to call 1901, 1906 or any of the other numbers above. A quick check of the Vodafone and Eircom websites reveals the same scenario - 1907 is free for Vodafone BillPay customers, and 1901 is free for Eircom customers, but no cost information on calling the other numbers.

You should be aware that in some situations, you actually won’t be able to call some of these numbers if you’re on a different network.

Back in April, we posted some observations from the UK about how their LoCall and CallSave equivalent numbers were being advertised - making them look like ordinary numbers rather than numbers that were likely to cause consumer pay extra in some cases.

My speculation back then was that it was possible that we could have the same thing here in Ireland with the 0818 range of numbers. By quoting the numbers as 081 8….. it might look like some other type of mobile number maybe.

And here’s the first example of that that I’ve seen (apologies again for the crappy photo quality - N95 phone strikes again):

As a comparison for prices, assume you’re an O2 mobile customer, and you think that this is just another mobile number (081) rather than the “universal access” number (0818).

Calling this number will cost you 35c per minute instead of being deducted from your bundle of minutes - and that could give you a nasty surprise on your bill.

The cost of calling 0818 numbers from most of the Irish telephone service providers is detailed here.

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.

We received this from a reader last week.

• Although the O2 service for billed customers is free on 1909, someone might find it useful to have the landline version. 061 203501

We have added numbers to the Banks section (BOI Credit Cards) and the Utilities section this evening on www.saynoto1890.com.

The two added to the Utilities section are for Pay as You Go Vodafone and Speakeasy O2 customers to call their respective customer services - but they only provide CallSave 1850 numbers.

These are interesting because these companies provide special numbers for their Bill Pay customers (1907 and 1909 respectively) - these numbers are free call numbers.

So, if you’re a Vodafone Pay As You Go customer, you pay 31c from your credit for every minute you are getting customer care.

And if you’re an O2 customer on a SpeakEasy plan, you pay 30c for each minute of your customer care calls.