BT first mobile company to offer free 0800 calls

BT has announced that it is the first company in the UK to offer free 0800 calls from its mobile phones.

BT Mobile will no longer be charged for calls to 'freephone' 0800 numbers – which have previously brought charges from all mobile operators.

Those charges can range from 25p a minute (Orange) to O2's rate of 15p, but BT Mobile is not only dropping the charge but calling for its rivals to follow suit.

"We think mobile customers are irritated by having to pay high rates to call 'free' 0800 numbers, so we have put our own house in order by making it free for any BT Mobile customer to call these numbers," explained BT Consumer's Managing Director John Petter.

Frustration

"We have all called an 0800 number from our mobiles and experienced the frustration of the message telling us that the call will be charged at standard rates," he added.

"A customer with Orange would pay £7.50 just to make a 30-minute call to their insurance company or bank and sort out a few issues. But if they made that call from a landline it would be free, so we can't see the need to have this huge difference in price.

"We had already made calls into BT free for our 14m landline customers and we are happy to back Consumer Focus and other consumer organisations in their efforts to address this anomaly.

"We also recently announced that calls to 0870 and 0845 numbers would be included in call packages for BT landline customers, so it is a good time to be calling these organisations from a BT landline or mobile."