Just to play devil’s advocate (because I'm a contrary sort of fella)I have been looking over the Ofcom guidelines, mainly because I pocket dialled Mrs Contrary-Fella last night and she heard 6 minutes of me rustling up some under cooked gubins in the kitchen. A lot of people are saying that silent calls should disconnect after 6 seconds, and according to Ofcom;
"A silent call is where you receive a call but you can hear nothing and have no means of knowing whether anyone is at the other end of the line."
They state most of these calls are down to auto diallers, so this wouldn’t be a case; it’s a private number to a private number.
Now my assumption is that your daughter either pocket dialled or neglected to hang up the phone after a conversation, meaning that although the line was silent it would not be a silent call according to Ofcom’s definition. My other assumption is that it went to someone’s voicemail or they would have hung up at their end, after all who wants to listen to a pocket for an hour. Either way that would be a user error.
Secondly I was curious as to how they would police this cut off after 6 seconds that people have been talking about, do O2 monitor the first six seconds of every calls, how would they decide its silent, would they monitor decibels, if so how would that work in say a nightclub environment (I didn’t want to look up the legalities too much like work).
So I took a closer look at Beenherebefore’s link the contents therein refer to a reaction to a certain scam known as vishing. There has been a spate recently from people pretending to be BT, they ring you up, claim you have an outstanding bill and if you don’t pay immediately they will cut you off. You call their bluff and they tell you to hang up and try to dial out, you try to dial out but are unable. This it because line stays live and they press mute, as soon as they hear the click when you hang up, call you back and say told you so pay up!
Anyway this regulation as it reads to mean is that after one party terminates a call the line should drop within 2 – 10 seconds. However, this seems to indicate that one party selects to terminate a call, which doesn’t appear to have happened in this case, so I am not sure it’s applicable to this case and it looks like a blind alley.
Now, I actually did work for O2, back in 2002-03 at their site on Dumers Lane in Radcliffe in Customer Services, and at the time we were allowed to give customers goodwill gestures, it was not an admission of guilt but sometimes it’s a cheaper way of resolving an issue, you have to think John doesn’t deal with this by himself, it is escalated up, through various levels each whom get paid subsequently more and more, to tell you that it looks like you forgot to hang up the phone and its not their fault. This way, they have saved some money, and you feel a little less aggrieved and it may aid their customer retention figures. Its just like TSB, if you take time during the day to go into branch to complain about service, the girl on the counter can compensate you up to £15 for your time.
Sometimes you just have to accept that accidents are accidents, and whilst it’s their job to provide a service, it’s not their job to police your usage. The £50.00 sounds like a win to me especially on a 5hr phone call, great battery.
