Re: 17 years before recovery, and the other side of the helpdesk is, umm.., as expected

Richard Gadsden <richard@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[...]
0345 numbers (as 0845 originally were) used to require the recipient of
the call to pay the difference between the long-distance call rate and the
lo-call charge the caller actually paid.

Minor correction: people getting their service directly from BT or Mercury
were screwed blind. 0845 was launched around 1995 mainly so that other
telcos could get their nose in the trough, but the settlement rates were set
so favourably that the other telcos could take calls from anywhere in the
country and backhaul them to London and still have money left over.

Obviously, this influx of free money meant that Demon could reduce the
GBP11.75/month subscription charge because they no longer had to pay to
operate PoPs all over the country. Or spend it on a working core router or
news server. Not that they bothered, of course.

0800/0808 numbers are too darn expensive to use as a non-geographic
number, which means that any decent sized corporate entity that wants
useful redundancy on their phone system has to use an 0845 number.

Heaven forbid that they might publish a geographic number. They're too
addicted to the revenue from operating de facto premium rate lines.

.

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