Changing phone number

Hi all,

Friend of mine joined Plusnet recently at my recommendation. Happy with BB, but coincidentally received a few prank calls. On calling Plusnet she was told that it would cost her £38 to have her number changed. This is after she asked them about it while the order was being processed, and was told at that tme to wait until the order was complete!

Is this correct? Does a phone provider have a duty to safeguard users, at minimal or no cost? As she is on a monthly account, she is thinking of cancelling already!

I know someone wlse who needed to change their mobile number, and it was done free of charge.

Any comments?

Thank you...

Irfan.

Hi Irfan,

A renumber certainly does cost £38.80.

We're charged that amount by OpenReach and we merely pass on the charge. We don't make a profit out of it.

Is the phone rental with Plusnet as well as the broadband, or just the broadband?

The phone rental is with Plusnet as well......

Hi,

There are a few things we can do to resolve nuisance calls, short of changing the number.

I'd recommend your friend talks to our support team.

Hi Mand

My new line has been in for about a 10 days, only connected a phone to it 2 days ago and already had 3 unsolicited calls from automated sales using withheld numbers.

I have not given the number to anyone, rang support who basically said tough, it's BTs fault for re-using old numbers and offered anonymous call reject at £4pm. My other line has been in for 20 years and gets about 2 or 3 of those calls a year, costs me £1.47pm for anon reject.

Simple answer in my case, I just unplugged the phone again and won't be using the Plusnet line for my calls.

Edited by jeff1106uk (Sat 10-Oct-09 04:48:34)

Don�t know if you have checked out the Ofcom pages for silent and nuisance calls, I have used their services for years and find it very good. It takes a few weeks to settle down, the form is simple to complete and the service is free.

In reply to a post by Puter:

Don�t know if you have checked out the Ofcom pages for silent and nuisance calls, I have used their services for years and find it very good. It takes a few weeks to settle down, the form is simple to complete and the service is free.

In our case, nothing to do with Plusnet line rental, we are on vanilla BT with the telephone Preference Service active.

Over the last few months we have received a large number of cold-selling calls. Frequently several a day from the same company but different live reps and many auto ones as well.

Even when the live ones are reminded about the TPS the repeat calls continue from different reps. I assume recording an answered call with a reference to the TPS counts as a black mark, or they just don't have time to record it with the pressure the actual poor sods are under.

As it is impossible to tell the gabbled name of the company when requested it's a bit of a nuisance.

I imagine the recession has pushed a lot of dodgy companies in this direction.

Hi,

Rather than anon call reject you could try choose to refuse. It allows you to block a number at exchange level, even if it's withheld.

It costs £6 a quarter, but in my experience you'd only need to have it for a few months in any case, as if the call is physically blocked people soon tend to give up.

I recently changed our DECT 'phone (since the keypad on the old one was dodgy), this one has an answerphone and I have found that the sales callers hang up and don't leave a message .

Registering my phone number with the TPS stopped most the sales calls we received - it takes about a month to kick in though and doesn't stop overseas sales calls.

Our phone number is registered with the TPS (BT gave us three new numbers in as many months, instead of my old number when I did an RTD from Bulldog). However it is not in our name on the TPS database, I discovered this when I came to register it as it said the number was already registered.

The answerphone seems to work well as a deterrent though.

In reply to a post by mand_beckett:

Rather than anon call reject you could try choose to refuse. It allows you to block a number at exchange level, even if it's withheld.

That's good. I didn't realise that was how it worked. Thanks Mand.

One of the reasons we haven't replaced our old and creaking Diverse 2010 setup is because we find 1571 perfectly adequate and don't want an answer machine.

But that's a factor we hadn't thought of.

TPS is becoming useless in my opinion. If it wasn't free I would probably ditch it.