Oh, Mr Porter, what shall I Do?
"Hello, it's me - could you call me back on this number?- if you're there!"
You're playing back the messages on the answering machine when you come across one from someone who leaves a request that you ring them a.s.a.p. on 07 700 900 002. What are you going to do? I'm offering three choices:
- you call them back at the earliest possible moment;
- you recognise that this is a mobile number and wait for your caller to ring again, because you reckon it's unreasonable of them to expect you to pay for what could be quite an expensive call;
- you recognise the mobile network from which the call has come, wait until the cheaper rates apply, and call using either your landline or your mobile, whichever results in a cheaper call cost.
If you answered (a), then you probably return all calls immediately as a matter of course. Beware of requests to call something like 0909 879 0980 - this could be a mega-expensive call, especially if it's set up as a scam. Some people rent premium lines like this and answer them with the perpetual sound of a ringing tone. Then they send text messages to mobiles or leave messages on answering machines asking you to call their number as a matter of urgency. I don't recommend it as a way of raising money to pay off the parish debt, but be warned of the existence of this and various other scams if you want to avoid your phone bill spiralling off into the four digit zone.
If you answered (b) then I admire you for your strength of purpose. Perhaps you'd like to join me in creating a set of golden rules for mobile phone users. Not only could we include the need to be aware that not everyone will want to rush into calling you on your "handy", especially during the daylight hours, but also we could attempt to banish for ever the phrase "just coming into the station, see you soon". By the way, did you hear the one about the man who as he approached Swindon was distinctly overheard by fellow-passengers as he made a call saying "coming into Liverpool right now, darling"?
If you answered (c) then I'm not quite sure what to say. You obviously have the kind of mind that absorbs numbers just like a schoolboy at the end of a railway platform. Or are you simply well plugged in to the various websites that offer this kind of information? If you visit OFTEL you can use their decoder to find out which particular tranches of numbers have been allocated to each network operator. They call this their "Specified Numbering Scheme" or SNS for short - OFTEL is paradise for lovers of acronyms. If the OFTEL search facility proves too unwieldy, you can follow their link to the Warwick University version of the SNS. This is generally held to be rather more user-friendly, but it's still not the speediest of operations to track down whether a caller is local or long haul.
Let's assume you've gone the distance and got the information. The 07700 number matches up (let us say) with the "Alpha One", network, which by sheer co-incidence happens to be the same network as you use yourself. Are you going to return the call using your land line or your mobile? The answer may differ according to the time of day or night. Calls between mobiles on the same network are charged much less than calls to other operators. That's why it's important that your family, friends, colleagues and other key contacts are all - if possible - on the same mobile network. It could be the difference between 5p (or less) per minute and as much as 40p a minute. So your call to 07700 should probably be made tonight using your mobile, since it's on the same network. In other circumstances you could expect it to be cheaper to call from your land line, on account of the inter-network price hike.
From alpha to omega
At this point, let me throw a spanner into the works. I suggested that your research led you to believe that 07700 belonged to the "Alpha One" network - and so it does, in my imaginary world that avoids the naming and shaming of any real players. However, I can now reveal that your mystery caller is among the many who were drawn by the more sophisticated tariff structure on offer at "Omega Net" They have been signed up for a transfer - but have retained their original number thanks to the facility of "number porting". For a small (well, relatively small) administrative charge they were able to walk out of the "Omega Net" shop with a temporary number and an assurance that their old number would be transferred to them within a month. The procedure has recently been speeded up (hopefully) by an agreement amongst the operators to use an automated procedure in place of fax messages. OFTEL reckons the process of porting a number should take no more than seven working days - but you can't even think about changing your supplier until your original contract runs out, unless you're prepared to pay extra for an early release.
Once you have ported your number, you're running a hybrid. Outgoing calls will be charged at the rates set by your new provider, Omega. Incoming calls from BT and other landline service providers will, however, still be charged as if they were calls to a mobile running on your original network, Alpha. Calls from mobiles will always be charged as though they were a call to a mobile on Omega. This means that all your regular callers who have Alpha phones will suddenly find that the cost of calling you has rocketed, because unknown to them they are now calling across a network boundary.
This has some disturbing implications. Surely you ought to know the cost of a call before you punch in the number? Given the vast difference (around eightfold at certain times and on certain tariffs) between a call to your home network and a call to an away network, it seems almost incredible that there should be no way of finding out the awful truth before the cash has been drained from your card. When I raised the matter with OFTEL some eighteen months ago, their response was to say "there is not an easy answer or a 'quick fix' solution". In their view "the benefits of portability have to be weighed against any potential problems regarding charging". There may well be developments in the pipeline that could help mobile users identify call costs, but typically OFTEL looks for these to be driven not by regulation but through consumer demand. Their current strategic plan states that: "Consumers must have adequate, reliable information so that they are in a position to choose the best combination of services and suppliers. Well informed consumers are a necessary element of an effectively competitive market".
Behold the see-through tariff
Which brings us to the whole issue of price transparency. Following my piece in the last issue of "Church Computer", I was grateful to receive a recommendation to visit the BookBrain website at http://www.bookbrain.co.uk. It's a "shop-bot" (i.e. "shopping robot") that seeks out the best deal for you. You tell it what book you want to buy and it comes up with a pretty comprehensive comparison of prices at internet bookshops. There are details of shipping costs and everything seems pretty effective, especially if you only want one book. Those with a list of half a dozen will agonise over how to split the order if there are varying levels of availability. Even if ordering from a single site where not all your books are immediately to hand, you need to be a master of strategy in order to minimise shipping costs. Amazon, for example, says that you must pay more to have the books sent on as they come into stock if you cannot wait for the whole order to come into stock. Those with great self-restraint (or short pockets) will take the option to wait, but they may sometimes be pleasantly surprised to discover that after a while Amazon prefer to send things out as they come in, rather than have them continue to take up space at the warehouse.
There are "shop-bots" to cover all sorts of purchases. Pricerunner is my general favourite, at http://www.pricerunner.com, but it's up to you to try them out and see which you prefer. Trying to buy things at the lowest possible price can become a very anorak-like task for a wet Sunday afternoon. The question is, do you really have no other considerations to take into account? What about the quality of packaging for dispatch? That and many other factors can only be taken into account when you've had some experience of dealing with the suppliers. The web was supposed to bring us great economic benefits by reducing consumer inertia and price friction. Price friction is the sort of thing I was illustrating with my story of the mobile phone tariffs. The suppliers are delighted if we appear to just use the things without any thought of the cost. The longer we spend in enquiring about the cost, the less likely we are to make a real purchase in the end. The more information we acquire about our next camera or hi-fi equipment, the further we are from entering our credit card details. We have become window shoppers - or windows shoppers, if you'll pardon the pun.
Perhaps you prefer to borrow your books instead of buying them. In this event you might be glad to make use of copac.ac.uk where you can synoptically browse the online catalogues of twenty of the largest university research libraries in the UK and Ireland. Helpful in tracing down the bibliographic details of elusive old books, but of limited practical application unless you have reader's rights at one of these institutions. But perhaps your local public library offers something similar. There are commercially produced book tracking systems that have been sold to a number of UK local authorities. As an Essex County Libraries user, for instance, I can log on at elan.essexcc.gov.uk and perform a simultaneous search across all stockholdings of all the public libraries in the county. If the book I want is somewhere else, I can request that it be sent to my local branch for me to pick up and borrow. Top marks to Essex for giving a discounted rate of charge to those that do this over the automated system rather than making the request face-to-face. Their site is east to use and highly informative - well done! #
Reaching the bot of the lot
Having read our pile of library books it's time to return to the net, this time to take a peek at the financial services sector. As price inflation holds steady and we apparently remain persuaded that nothing will ever cost more tomorrow than it does today, we have plenty of time to ask all sorts of questions. In the area of financial products, for example, we can play around with figures apparently endlessly in order to arrive a tailor-made insurance quote, fuel supply tariff or credit card agreement that is just perfect for our special needs. But do watch out: are you sure that you can commit yourself to burning more than so many megawatts, driving less than so many miles, or signing up to a fixed rate of interest? Not all questions have the answer immediately to hand. If you draw foreign cash on your credit card, are you better off with a Bank A that charges no commission but uses the tourist rates of exchange, or with Bank B that charges a modest rate of commission but uses the lower inter-bank rates of exchange? The answer to this may not be available without some practical experiment, as also the speed with which your new bank applied incoming deposits to your credit and starts to pay you interest on the sums involved.
Such minutiae lie beyond the capacity of even the most sophisticated financial robot to hit the city streets - known by the ugly name of an "agglomerater-bot". The general idea is that you type in and store online all financial details and they monitor your wealth from minute to minute, ever keen to make suggestions as to where you should keep your assets stashed away. Instead of moving all your worldly wealth from the blue sock to the red sock tonight, you could let part of it bed and breakfast in some other fund overnight in order to maximise your earnings. That begs the question, would you trust a piece of software to make decisions about your personal finances? Many of the big institutions in the City have now reached the point of no return, hence the fear of exponential feedback causing havoc in the event of a system failure triggering irrational buying or selling on the money markets. Even if you have faith in the software, can you really trust the human beings at the other end if their machines have all digested your selection of passwords and pin numbers?
By which point you're probably coming to the conclusion that not all information is worth having. Which you really knew already! You can only spend so much time surfing the internet. Life has to be more than getting the right tariff for every purchase. Your journey into cyberspace has just been retarded by price friction. Welcome back to the real world. But let's not forget all that we've learned out there: there is a real need for greater transparency in our dealings. If we ask what is the price, we ought to be able to get a fair answer before we buy. The mobile phone networks are clearly out of order when they expect us to make a call without being able to know what the charge will be.
A man that looks on glass…
Does transparency have an application within the Church? Well, many people receive bills from the undertaker with a disbursement included for 'Minister's Fee'. As a Church of England clergyman I know that this sum helps to pay my stipend and to meet my working expenses. I would nevertheless feel happier if the bereaved were not left to conclude that I am personally better off to the tune of about eighty pounds for every funeral I conduct. Some clearer public awareness about the waiver of fees would also be most welcome. I can't realistically consult with 500 other clergy in our diocese each time I feel drawn to waive an assigned fee in which we all share an interest. So I find that the only thing I can do is to dip into own pocket and make good the contribution of fees I am so anxious to spare the particular family in question.
Again, how many parishes provide a fully transparent breakdown of wedding fees? Once again I can only speak as a member of the Church of England, where the set fee is supposed to include the cost of paying a caretaker/verger to sweep the floor and perform such other duties as may be necessary. Sadly one still hears of parishes that pile in some enormous extras on the basis that "they're paying so much for everything else, the church is by far and away the cheapest part of the day", or, even more angrily, "they're just using us". Perhaps someone needs to set up a website that compares individual churches. Mind you, they'd have to be pretty determined if they wanted to discover every last detail: when the telephone rings and a hesitant voice enquires "does he marry divorcees?", my wife replies with a smile "No - he marries people!"