You can’t make this up; T-Mobile is, according to an article in The Register, doubling the cost of 08xx calls because OfCom told them to! OfCom told the operator to ensure that they were charging 0870, 0871, 0844 and 0845 calls as “normal” national calls. As T-Mobile mainly bundles lots of minutes with each contract, it appears to have set the “normal” national rate to be their out of bundle rate for a landline call. However, they are not going to include these calls in their bundled minutes, so as a result, the actual cost of calling these numbers will now increase. T-Mobile have said “To make things clearer for our customers, we have aligned our 08 number charges with local and national calls to follow the latest Ofcom guidelines. These calls aren’t included as part of your allowance in any of our price plans.”

Flext customers will go from 10ppm to 20ppm, Just SIM or Solo customers will go from 10ppm to 30ppm, and Freetime customers will now pay 40pp (peak). These changes will take effect on 28th July.

With those sorts of rates, we suspect even more mobile users will be heading to saynoto0870.com (which actually covers most of the 08x ranges) to find alternative national landline numbers, instead of calling 08xx numbers, and then the call will come out of your allowance.

We’ll have to see how the other operators react, but here’s a thought to them: why not include them in the minutes, just like you used to 5 years ago, and whilst you’re there, how about making freephone calls (0800, 0808) calls actually free as well…?

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 at 9:00 am and is filed under Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.