[okfn-coord] Large phone bill from Advisory Board Member...

Tue Jan 12 22:33:39 UTC 2010

I guess we now have a board majority on reimbursing the full amount.
If there are no objections, I will ask Peter how best to reimburse
him. (Any tips on international money transfer, charges, etc. would be
much appreciated. E.g. could we just send him a cheque in the post?)

Jonathan

On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 10:26 PM, Jo Walsh <jo at frot.org> wrote:
> dear all,
>
> On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 5:31 PM, Jordan S Hatcher
> <jordan at opencontentlawyer.com> wrote:
>>>> There seems no easy way to compare price.
>>> What  I still cannot understand was how he got charged >$3 per minute.
>>> The call was no longer than 90m. If with international code etc. I
>>> take it the board consensus is for us to pay this in full ...
>
> Telephone billing is a black art. I asked Will about this, as he's
> done some telco billing work. >$3/minute is "very steep, though not
> out of the range of possibility". E.g. from a Bell Canada landline it
> costs 79 cents a minute to call an 0844/5 number, from a mobile
> cheaper.
>
> It is worth Peter querying the charge with his service provider - one
> possibility is that they mistakenly have one billing rate for 08*
> numbers, and 0844 is being billed at an 0870 number rate.
>
> Agreed that OKF should take this one for the team.
> Agreed that we should look at new options for conf calling - even at
> UK rates we are each of us paying more than we need to call 0845.
>
> It would be great to have an idea of monthly subscription costs for
> alternative services that provide toll-free numbers. Are these things
> flat rate, does one pay for consumed time or number of users, etc.
>
> Will's suggestions -
>
> This seems counterintuitive, but so does telephone billing - we could
> use http://www.freeconferencecall.com/ which only has US numbers - but
> depending on your contract, it is likely to be cheaper to call the US
> from the UK than to call an 0845 number.
>
> Non-UK people can use a cornershop calling card to call a UK landline.
>
> Or non-UK people can get an account with http://www.sipgate.co.uk/ to
> have an originating UK number and pay standard landline rates.
>
> All these displace the cost onto those giving their time, one-by-one,
> and if it's affordable and there is enough frequency of conf calls
> then a service with free incoming calls would be really great.
>
> We could consider going back to Skype - perhaps I've just forgotten
> how poor the quality of Skype conferencing audio is.
>
> I wonder how ORG, for example, do this.
>
> cheers,
>
>
> jo
>
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>

-- 
Jonathan Gray

Community Coordinator
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://www.okfn.org

Twitter/Identica: jwyg