Home Phone features change

[#1]

Hey - I've passed your ticket to prov and asked them to place an order for this feature for you manually, your billing for this feature will start when the underlying problem is resolved.

[#2]

OK, Thanks Ben, any idea when the service will become active ?

[#3]

Prov tend to be fairly busy so a few days I would think; possibly before the weekend if we're lucky but more realistically Monday - Tuesday.

[#4]

OK Fair enough, but I've just seen this months bill and there is a charge of £4.50, it says "Call features option 2 charge 07/09/2012 06/10/2012 £4.50"  and the service is not yet active. In any event Call Diversion is only £2.50.
The invoice number is 35934847.
Regards,
Wayne Morrell

[#5]

£4.50 looks like the charge for a 3-feature bundle. Does that fit what you have with Voicemail Extra charged separately (can't be bundled)?

[#6]

I still can't understand why BT & PN charge for these "extra" features. There's almost zero marginal cost in providing them as a service. It is all automated. I use Vonage and get something like 20 extra features bundled free into the price and the call costs are lower too.
It seems to me that BT/PN are being a bit "Ryan Air" on providing these services, except their base prices are not cheaper.

[#7]

Because BT Wholesale charge for it
Vonage uses VOIP which is totally different

[#8]

Quote from: spraxyt

£4.50 looks like the charge for a 3-feature bundle. Does that fit what you have with Voicemail Extra charged separately (can't be bundled)?

I actually had the other features removed except for caller display which I held on to, have ordered divert but not active yet so just the one feature at the moment.
Regards,
Wayne

[#9]

@waynemorrell
I've sorted your account so you just have Caller Display active in billing which matches your line. Your DD is still pending so I can't refund the £4.50 so I've added it as a discount on your next bill; you'll just be charged £0.99 for features from now on.
@AlaricAdair
There's always a cost associated with developing systems to run call features. Where do you think your voicemails are stored? They're on a server somewhere which needs lots of hard drives, processors, connectivity, electricity and all the development costs which went into it and maintenance costs. The same thing applies to other features too.

[#10]

@BenTrimble
It looks like you are being massively overcharged for your IT Infrastructure if you think storing a few voice messages per subscriber has a significant cost.
Let's say a person on average keeps 10 voice messages - that will take around 10 mega bytes of disk storage on average as a running storage load per subscriber.
Using the Amazon S3 pricing for resilient cloud disk space storage (power, hardware and backup) the cost for those 10 voice messages is around one tenth of a cent ($0.001) per month; let's say £0.01 a year rounding up. Add the data transfer costs (as per Amazon) and it doubles to 2 pence a year.

I know about enterprise IT Infrastructure and development pricing models, I used to build them for a 100,000 person international organisation and I had to make a profit.

[#11]

Essentially we charge for them because Openreach charge us for them.
I don't know the actual running costs they incur to do so.

[#12]

Quote from: Ben

Prov tend to be fairly busy so a few days I would think; possibly before the weekend if we're lucky but more realistically Monday - Tuesday.

Still no sign of it, 8 days and counting... 

[#13]

As per the ticket on your account, the order was placed on the 8th and was due to activate today - although it looks like BT have pushed that back by a day, sorry about that. Give us a nudge if you're not up and running by the 14th please