Check this out. It’s part of my Orange phone bill for last month. I’ve changed my package and this particular phone doesn’t get used a great deal. I pay around £30 per month, but this bill totalled over £55 so I looked deeper into it.
Last month I had my car crash, so all these calls are to various breakdown companies, insurance numbers and the like. There’s a couple of 0870 numbers, which I expected to cost a bit, but the 0800 numbers shocked me. 0800 numbers in the UK are free, but if you call them on a mobile they’ll charge you. There’s various boring reasons for this and they’ll warn you before putting you through, but I figured it wouldn’t cost too much because, after all, it’s free from a BT landline. As you can see I was slightly wrong. A call lasting nearly 10 minutes cost me £1.18 whilst a 5 minute call cost me another 70p. Bear in mind that for the majority of the call I was stood at the roadside waiting for my turn in the queue or I was stuck on hold. It’s incredibly annoying, but £2 for 15 minutes?
The 0870 numbers are perhaps the worse. £3.15 for less than 19 minutes on a call. In that one day following the accident I spent nearly £13 just calling my insurance company and the breakdown people!
Lesson of the day – don’t call 0800 or 0870 numbers from your mobile.
0870 and 0800 numbers on your mobile
September 24, 2008