HELLO & WELCOME

[WelshPaul]

From Monday, 9th January 2017 Voipfone are increasing and decreasing depending on the destination their international call charges. Also, From Monday, 13th February 2017 Voipfone will be removing all the international destinations from the landline packages. This means that from that date the landline minutes packages become UK only.

Below is the notice I received via emal this morning:

Dear Paul,

It's been many years since we made changes to international call prices and since then call costs have changed radically - both increasing and decreasing depending on the destination. In the past we have chosen to absorb these changes rather than impose frequent and confusing updates. Lately though, international call charges have become unstable and our prices are now badly out of date. We try to change our prices as rarely as possible but the time has come to overhaul them.

There is both good and bad news here; some countries have made increases in the cost of sending a call to them, but an almost equal number have made similar sized decreases. It's a country-by-country political decision what each country charges us to terminate a call there.

While making these changes we've also taken the opportunity to rationalise our international price groups and discount packages.

The changes in brief:

From Monday, 9th January 2017
1. There will be increases and decreases in prices to approximately 75% of all country destinations - both landlines and mobiles. However, the majority of prices to the most popularly dialled countries will not be changed.

2. International mobile destinations in the 10p category will be both added to and removed. More have been added than removed.

3. A very high user UK mobile package will be introduced which reduces their cost to 3.5p per minute; a saving of 65%.

From Monday, 13th February 2017
We'll be removing all the international destinations from the landline packages. This means that from that date the landline minutes packages become UK only.

If you buy the landline minutes package specifically for dialling other countries you should take note of this. We're providing 6 weeks notice of this change so that you don't lose any benefit for packages you might have already bought.

Packages auto-renew every 30 days on your billing date. If you need to change your package before your individual billing date, you can do it here.

Details of the changes

There are over 200 countries with multiple prices to each so the full range of price changes cannot be usefully put into this email. To see the new prices ahead of the change, please go here.

Personally I don't make any international calls, do you?

[gsmlnx]

Occasional user but it would have been nice as a customer to get the email too. Cannot see a change that affects me.

[WelshPaul]

@gsmlnx I hadn't realized until I read your post, I have multiple Voipfone accounts, each one registered against a different email address. I usually receive the same email up to six times, one email from Voipfone sent to each of the email addresses assigned to every Voipfone account.

However, I only received the one email? The other five accounts I hold, I received nothing! Not sure if Voipfone are sending out mass emails in stages or not, I guess time will tell. I also noticed that there is nothing about this price change on the Voipfone websites main page, Voipfone Blog or Voipfone user forum. This month could turn out to be expensive month for Voipfone customers that never received the email and whom make a lot of international calls every month.

Even Voipfone's current International Call Prices page doesn't mention anything about the coming price increase: http://www.voipfone.co.uk/prices_home_international.php

[gsmlnx]

Could come back to haunt them too especially given the marketing they use about being honest and open with their customers. They are not my main provider so not using them wouldn't harm me nor their profit margin given my low use.

[WelshPaul]

Not mine either, haven't been for a long time. Also, I found support isn't as good as it used to be at Voipfone anymore anyway...

Like most companies, as they grow systems and staff become segregated. Voipfone have become too departmentalised with the obvious situation that nobody has a clue what is going on in other departments. Personally whenever I have needed to contact Voipfone in the past (live chat or phone support) i'm always holding because the customer support agent dealing with my request needs to speak with someone in another department.

It's not just Voipfone either, Voicehost have gone down the same route which was the root cause of this issue fiasco: viewtopic.php?f=9&t=955

I would still recommend them though, both Voipfone and Voicehost have a rock solid network.

[gsmlnx]

Well the International call prices page has been updated to the new prices BUT still no email to me the customer nor any mention on the page about the new prices nor any blog.

[WelshPaul]

Yea, just been browsing voipfone.co.uk after comparing inclusive mobile minute plans and noticed that Voipfone had updated their International call prices page. I was just going to post a reply saying the same thing! None of my other email addresses that I have registered against other Voipfone accounts had an email notifying me of the pending changes/price increase.