Orange, my mobile phone company, had this to say about freephone / toll free calls now costing money in my latest bill:
From 1st December 2005 all 0800 and 0500 freephone calls cost 10 pence per minute (including VAT) on all Orange tariffs. When you call a freephone number, a voice message will remind you that you’ll be charged for the call. Calls to these numbers are not part of your inclusive minutes.
Kind of takes the “free” out of freephone calls when you’re charging 10P per minute, don’t you think?
To give you some perspective, I can call the US for 4P per minute on my Orange phone. I registered my phone with OneTel, so I call a local number and that’s what they charge me. But if I want to call a “free” number in the UK, it’s more than twice that!
I headed over to the Orange web site and sent a little note saying that as a customer, I wasn’t pleased. Orange was very concerned:
Thank you for taking the time to write to us with your views on the service we provide. It is through feedback such as yours that we are able to assess the effectiveness of our service.
I don’t even call freephone numbers that often, but it’s just another chip into my supposed inclusive minutes. It’s already annoying that non-geographic numbers used by many businesses, such as 0845 numbers, don’t count as included minutes. Most of my calls end up being to these, since they rarely seem to offer freephone numbers. As I said, I don’t make many freephone calls on my mobile, but I definitely resent Orange racking up 10p from me if and when I do.
Maybe the other major UK companies do the same. I’ll let you know when I start looking for a new provider. By the way, I came across a forum with lots of discussion on the issue. Check out the threads here and here.
