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UK mobile phone numbers hellscape

Mobyle

ULTIMATE Member
According to https://www.idmobile.co.uk/help-and-advice/premium-rate-numbers
the following numbers are premium rate, including my 07441 A&A and Xpatfone voip numbers:

074580,074581£2.00
074080,074081,074082,074088,074089,074178,074572,075594£2.00
079787£2.00
077001£2.00
074187,074189£2.00
075205£2.00
079788£2.00
074410,074515,075898£2.00
075376,075592£2.00
076607£2.00

Sky has an even more extensive guide called "Sky Talk Specialised Phone Numbers - UK".

So the UK has a phone numbering scheme that resembles the 9 Circles of Hell.
 
We do have control in the form of Ofcom National Numbering Plan. It is just that now people are utilising call forwarding and linking numbers that are breaking the conventions such as the A&A 07 offering.

070 Personal Numbers

076 (except 07624 – see Part C5) Radiopaging Service

071 to 075 inclusive and 077 to 079 inclusive Mobile Services

Mobile providers often state that a plan includes UK mobile numbers. However if they know the number(s) are not to a recognised mobile network and hence part of the netting/reciprocal arrangements between network providers they can rightly exclude them.

In my view UK VoIP numbers should be 01, 02 or 03 and registered to a UK address.

In the same way people have broken the old STD prefixes on geographical numbers by moving and taking their number with them or porting to VoIP and using it anywhere in the world. I have always thought that one way of stopping scamming would be to prevent calls with UK geographical numbers coming from abroad.

It is us that are breaking the rules.
 
Agree that having specially tariffed number ranges within 072-079 is a nonsense and yet again OfCOM aka Office of Comedy regulator is failing to protect consumers by allowing the industry to get away with this. Even the long-standing exceptions for Manx and Jersey/Guernsey Telecoms within the 07 range were bad enough.

Seems to me that the tariff nonsense that previously happened with 0870, 0845 and 0990 is going to happen all over again
 
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The special rates badly need overhauling, the numbering plan in its current format was designed before mobiles were as ubiquitous and landlines ruled the land. I remember my mobile that began 0403 (UK Cellnet) had to be cleared into the 07 range, unbelievably that was about 25 years ago.

I would like to see the 07 and 08 plans overhauled, 07 to be used exclusively by mobiles and nothing else. 08 to be either free or landline rates. All special rates to shift to 04 and that to be graduated based on fees so 040 is the lowest cost and 049 the highest.

As I've said in a different thread recently, Ofcom are not especially effective and it will take a scandal to happen before change is effected (such as the 089x competition lines of the 90s, the charged calls for closed TV competition entries, the 09x based customer service lines).
 
Agree that having specially tariffed number ranges within 072-079 is a nonsense and yet again OfCOM aka Office of Comedy regulator is failing to protect consumers by allowing the industry to get away with this. Even the long-standing exceptions for Manx and Jersey/Guernsey Telecoms within the 07 range were bad enough.

Seems to me that the tariff nonsense that previously happened with 0870, 0845 and 0990 is going to happen all over again
Yeah, I honestly find it dumb that numbers registered in the Channel Isles are chargeable on UK providers. A clear indication needs to be used for them (is the 04, 05 or 06 number ranges used?) or providers need to just make them free.

Almost got charged 19p once for trying to activate a copy of Windows Vista in a virtual machine by text by Virgin due to this BS, good job I had a spend cap back then (I can't tell whether O2 has removed mine now).
 
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A quick Google suggest that in 2015 ofcom introduced caps for 071-075 and 077-079 of 0.68p.

Maybe they need to regulate which numbers are included in bundles and which aren't now
 
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The whole situation is daft as there is so much space in the national numbering plan where specially tariffed services could be allocated.
I don't think we use 04, 05 or 06 numbers, at least I've never seen one (other than 0500 for freephone which I think might be defunct). 07 should be mobiles, with these expensive-rate services shifted into another range.
 
In 05 as far as I know from memory there are 0500 numbers (former Mercury's free phone number range, there's still a few in use) and 055 for voip numbers allocated.

The 055 range hasn't been popular because the 055 number range looks odd to most people so they assume it's scammy, inbound calls to 055 are typically not included in bundled minutes, although it can be useful when you need to give a number to someone but you don't really want them to call you.

As far as I know all of 04 and 06 are available for use and most of 05. And plenty of room in 08 which is for specially tariffed services which is kinda a good fit for those not quite mobile numbers hiding in plain sight in 07.
 
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The more I think about it, the less sense it makes for most of the charges on the telephone network as we move away from pstn. Think of the internet, we're not charged to send emails but instead we pay an isp to get online.

As we move to an entirely ip based phone system, there's far less infrastructure involved than even the final incarnation of the pstn, BT's 21CN. Go back to the early years of telecom and you'd have manual operators with more being involved the further away you called, then under automated operation using Strowger you'd still have multiple selectors involved increasing in use the further the call was. We had load balancing charging more between 8am-1pm weekdays to encourage businesses to call after 1pm then residential use was encouraged to be after 6pm with evening rates, that's something we don't think about because balancing is no longer required to the extent Strowger was pushed to.

There may still be room for premium rates in this new style of charging, but global markets need to change or they'll lose out. I used to look at the rates some countries used and remember exotic sounding places like Turks and Caicos or Tuvalu costing an absolute fortune, yet now we can call for free on WhatsApp so why would anyone use the pstn for that call?

I'd be interested what people think to my suggestion.
 
The more I think about it, the less sense it makes for most of the charges on the telephone network as we move away from pstn. Think of the internet, we're not charged to send emails but instead we pay an isp to get online.

As we move to an entirely ip based phone system, there's far less infrastructure involved than even the final incarnation of the pstn, BT's 21CN. Go back to the early years of telecom and you'd have manual operators with more being involved the further away you called, then under automated operation using Strowger you'd still have multiple selectors involved increasing in use the further the call was. We had load balancing charging more between 8am-1pm weekdays to encourage businesses to call after 1pm then residential use was encouraged to be after 6pm with evening rates, that's something we don't think about because balancing is no longer required to the extent Strowger was pushed to.

There may still be room for premium rates in this new style of charging, but global markets need to change or they'll lose out. I used to look at the rates some countries used and remember exotic sounding places like Turks and Caicos or Tuvalu costing an absolute fortune, yet now we can call for free on WhatsApp so why would anyone use the pstn for that call?

I'd be interested what people think to my suggestion.

I think many people have already reached that point where their mobile telephone number is just a token that gives them access via iMessage, Whatsapp, Signal, etc. and phone calls are made to/from businesses and by neophobes.
 
I agree that the PSTN is on the way out, but the landscape of various competing messenger platforms is still complex, the the simplicity of just being able to dial a number and talk to someone is a lowest common denominator that usually works assuming there is a human at the end and not some mess of automated nonsense.

I do wonder if the agreed but yet to be implemented interop between Google and Apple for RCS might be an opportunity for a new lowest common denominator in the future, or if it will be too little too late.

The challenge with the current UK number mess is that these special services do not qualify to be included as mobile numbers either (a) for unnecessary commercial reasons which probably also includes 055 VoIP range or (b) there is a genuine need for some inbound revenue to fund the service which means that in the PSTN world it should be an 08 number. In the online world having a frictionless micropayment required based upon an infrequent interaction would really be scammers gold.
 
I still use phone calls between me and friends/family members because the voice quality on WhatsApp is so poor - there's often a delay, and there's a lot of hiss, and generally it sounds really compressed and hard to listen to compared to just making a mobile-to-mobile call within the UK, especially from my house where I have a mast up the street and top signal.

Landline numbers are odd these days, too. In my home town growing up, all the local landline numbers used to start with a 2, it wasn't a very big town so they could fit them all into that range. Going back now, I see businesses with numbers starting with all the digits from 2-9, presumably using VoIP rather than a landline. You don't even have to have a presence in a town to have a number there - I got a very thin Yellow Pages through the door a while ago and it was full of fake ads for "your local plumber" with numbers in each local STD code.
 
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