BT is challenging its fixed-line competitors head-on by offering customers national evening and weekend calls up to 20 times cheaper than its major rivals.
The huge savings are part of a radical new pricing structure for the successful BT Together scheme which sees the end of per-minute charging for all evening and weekend calls and makes distance irrelevant, with one rate for UK and local calls.
This means BT Together customers will pay just 6p for up to an hour on all evening and weekend calls made to anywhere in the UK. If the number is one nominated under the Friends and Family scheme, the cost of the call will be reduced by an extra 10 per cent.
Customers switching from rivals Telewest will save money every time they pick up the phone, while savings will be made against the current rates of ntl and One.Tel on all national calls lasting more than a minute. Thirty-minute and one-hour national evening calls with One.Tel cost 78p and 1.53 pounds, compared with just 6p under BT Together. And a single 10-minute national evening call using Car Phone Warehouse costs 13 pence more.
Angus Porter, managing director of BT Retail's consumer division said: "We are determined to be competitive and build on our position as the consumer champion in fixed-line telephony. We have kept our market share constant for the past two years in the face of increasing competition. This radical move provides the simplicity and lower charges that will give customers stronger reasons than ever to choose BT over any other company in the market.
"Claims by some competitors of savings over BT are often just plain misleading, as they are based on comparisons with our standard rate, which is only for customers for whom it would not be economic to be on a fixed call package. Today's changes make it simpler for many customers to spot the real deal.
"Our offer of 6p for all evening and weekend calls up to an hour virtually removes the need to compare our prices with other operators. What you see is what you get, with no need to think about any other items like call connection charges. Just consider that Telewest charges the same amount to connect a call as BT Together customers will pay for an hour. And the cost of a good gossip, say half-an-hour's chat with friends or relatives in another part of the UK at the weekend, will be substantially cheaper with BT Together. With BT, that chat will cost 6p, while British Gas will charge 45p, Carphone Warehouse, 57p, and the Post Office, £1.08."
The existing BT Together options have been streamlined to give the company's 10 million existing customers three simple-to-understand options each geared to their level of phone use:
Option 1, the 6p hour plan - customers will pay a flat rate of 6p for up to an hour on all evening and weekend local and national calls. Daytime calls will be charged at 3p a minute, a 25 per cent saving on the previous price for national calls;
Option 2, the evening and weekend plan, offers the first hour for free on all evening and weekend local and national calls. The charges for daytime calls will be the same as for Option 1;
Option 3, the anytime plan, offers the first hour free on all UK calls at any time of day.
Each of the three options will have a fixed monthly fee that reflects the level of usage. Option 1 will cost £11.50 a month; Option 2, £17.50 and Option 3, £28.50.
The new options, which are to be introduced on June 1, are a direct response to over a million BT customers who replied to the UK's biggest-ever survey of customer opinion, which revealed a strong desire for lower, less-complicated call charges and greater certainty over their phone bills.
Porter added: "We believe these three new options represent excellent value-for-money and will not only be popular with our existing customers but will attract large numbers of new customers to BT."
