I dialed 0800 not 800!

How annoying is it when you’re nowhere near a landline and you know that you need to make a call to an 0800 number that you can bet is going to last around an hour and a half (mostly listening to Greensleeves as you will undoubtedly be on hold!).

I personally, being the tight-fisted-£10-only-top-up Pay & Go user, get chills of anger through my spine when I hear the electronic woman on the other end of my handset telling me that although the 0800 number I am trying to call is normally free, I now have to remove the first “0” and suffer an unfair charge for the benefit.

However, my pain and the pain of many others around the country can now be pushed to the back of our minds as BT have now announced that 0800 numbers can now be contacted for free from a mobile phone – as long as it’s on the BT Mobile network.

BT’s biased stance on the 0800 fiasco…

Unfortunately, that last little bite of information rules me out, being on a different network and I must continue to be subject to the unfair 25p-per-minute charge.

I’m not the only mobile phone user in the country that has made a call to the supposed Free-phone number as a recent survey made by MoneySupermarket found that 41 per cent of the population of Britain had indeed followed suit and rang an 0800 number from their mobile phone.

However, slightly more impressive than that little figure is that a whopping 69 per cent of users who have called an 0800 number have absolutely no idea how much the privilege has been charging them.

£50 million a year in extra charges.

So if you think that the constant 25p-per-minute on alleged free numbers is actually racking up a bill of £50 million a year, it’s no wonder that BT have made the move, and have made it exclusively for their clients.

“We think that mobile customers are irritated by having to pay high rates to call ‘free’ 0800 numbers, so we have put our own house in order by making it free for any BT Mobile customer to call these numbers,” said the managing director of BT’s consumer business, John Petter.

Petter went on to comment on how annoying the scenario can be when you are told that you have to pay for the “free call”, as I ranted a little earlier.� My answer to Petter is, YES IT IS…now enjoy your free-calls – have you got a spare 25p?

Anyone else want to be nice?

Now if only the other providers followed in BT’s footsteps and gave their valued customers a little helping hand through the economic crisis then I’m sure we would all appreciate it, however the other networks have remained tight lipped about the move.

“A customer with Orange would pay £7.50 just to make a 30-minute call to their insurance company or bank and sort out a few issues. But if they made that call from a landline it would be free, so we can’t see the need to have this huge difference in price,” continued Petter.

We can’t either, Petter.