Jon Bradford: I recently bought a T-Mobile G1 phone, only to discover that if I were to use an alternative voicemail provider I would incur an excessive diversion charge.
Ordinarily I would be charged 12 pence per minute for my voicemail calls. Diverting my calls to an innovative voicemail provider such as HulloMail or SpinVox would incur a diversion charge of 17 pence per minute. I would go so far as to suggest that the cost of the diversion to an alternative voicemail service may be considered to be anti-competitive.
What really annoys me is how can a full voicemail service cost 12 pence per minute, whilst a diversion charge is 17 pence per minute. This is clearly unrepresentative of T-Mobile’s marginal costs.
A copy of the full letter can be found below:
Subscribe in a reader
Subscribe by Email
It seems strange for T-Mobile UK to charge 17p/min for diverts to non T-Mobile numbers seeing as it was only until quite recently that T-Mobile was the only operator in the UK that offered voicemail for free. Vodafone, O2 and Orange have been charging (in some shape of form) for voicemail for a long time. I seem to remember that T-Mobile only started charging for voicemail quite recently (a year or two?) as it appeared to them that free voicemail wasn’t a differentiator. Maybe this 17p/min premium is a strange config side-effect of that move to free voicemail, in which case I hope it would be a simple priceplan/config update to rectify.
Have you sent a letter of Ofcom as well? I seem to remember that Ofcom requires operators to only charge for things that they have told customers about in their documentation, i.e. they would have to update all the pricing documentation and their website if they wanted to keep this premium.
Have you had a reply to your letter yet?