Telediscount

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http://www.telediscount.co.uk/accessnumbers.php

Well that's not bad in my opinion. What they do say is that it will give you phone calls at 0845 rates to all the following destinations: (I've listed them in the order that I think peeps who post here are most likely to have friends in or deal with suppliers in)

• UK local
• UK national
• Canada
• Ireland
• Alaska
• Hawaii
• New Zealand
• France
• Belgium
• Spain
• Italy
• Netherlands
• Austria
• Finland
• Japan
• Malaysia
• Poland
• Yugoslavia
• US Virgin Islands
• Brazil
• Puerto Rico
• North Mariana Islands (I have no idea where that is - anyone know? Thanks)

Pity you can't do 48-state continental USA, Australia and Germany on the 0845 number - they have an 0870 number for that, but you can do better elsewhere.

If you have a BT phone line, then you can use Powergen indirect access - their rate for 0845 numbers is 1p per minute in the evening and weekend. Furthermore, they automatically discount your ten most heavily used phone numbers by 20% - which means that if you only ever use Powergen to call the Telediscount access number (and possibly an 0845 ISP as well), then all evening and weekend calls to the above places will be charged at 0.8p per minute.

Course, what Telediscount don't tell you is that you'll probably be hit by the minimum charge of your main phone supplier if you only make short calls. Bear in mind that this doesn't just apply to calls that are answered but the person you want isn't in (ie you get an answering machines, a secretary or a housemate) but it also applies to calls to numbers which are engaged, or which ring out without being answered at all.

However, you can improve on that by using the "follow on call facility". You don't hang up, but instead wait for Telediscount to ask you if you want to make another call. You can retry the same number just by pressing 1, or if you want to try another number, press 2 and then dial it.

Snag is, though, unless anyone here knows different, you have to wait for the remote party to hang up. You can't make Telediscount hang up on them to enable to you to make another call. And once the remote party has hung up, you usually need to wait another 60 seconds for the line to clear down (unless you get a network based voicemail service such as BT Answer, or the remote party has diverted their phone to a mobile, in which case it happens immediately).

That also means that if you ever get an answering machine, and you want to use the follow on call facility, you need to find a way of forcing the answering machine to hang up on you, rather than hanging on for several minutes recording a message that you'd rather not leave. Many of them will do this if you press * a few times. I've also discovered that if you get put through to BT Answer, then you can force it to hang up on you by waiting for the beep, then pressing 0 four times, roughly one second between each. However, this will place a blank message in the remote party's mailbox, and doing this repeatedly might irritate them - but once their mailbox is full up, you will then be able to retry roughly four times a minute until you get through. After all, you might as well get your 5p minimum charge's worth and keep retrying for at least seven minutes.

I'd be interested to know if anyone knows if there's a way of getting Telediscount to terminate a call so that you can use the follow on call feature without waiting for the remote party to hang up. Failing that, I'd like to know if there's a way of forcing BT Answer or Call Minder to hang up on you as quickly as possible without placing blank messages in the mailbox. Thanks.

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Grr! People who insist on picking up the phone again immediately after hanging up and dialling 1471 are beginning to annoy me! You have to get them to hang up and leave their phone alone for 60 seconds so that you can make the next call. When they pick up the phone again within 60 seconds, then that means you have to wait yet another 60 seconds before it'll trigger off the Telediscount follow-on call menu.

There are two ways I guess you could handle this. One is, you could explain to your average non-techie phone user who doesn't care about call charges (more fool them) that you need them to stay off the phone for 60 seconds, and put up with questions about why, and try as hard as possible not to get into discussions about Wes Craven flicks. But hey, I honestly can't be bothered with that, it's a waste of time. I've discovered on these forums that as far as most people are concerned, Oftel and phone competition might as well not exist, they don't care anyway, they would much rather grumble about BT's 5p minimum charge on calls to numbers with BT Answer 1571 on them than actually find out how to make the problem go away. I'd much prefer just to get on with my next call as soon as possible.

So, instead, I just go silent on them, and hold the mute button down until they finally give up. They might check for a dialling tone two or three times, but they usually give up after about 30 seconds. If it dragged on much longer than that, then I'd probably pipe up and try to explain exactly how the Telediscount follow-on call feature works, but I've never had to do this yet.

Anyone have any suggestions? Thanks.