Get rid of BT 1571 and save £22 a year

BT’s 1571 service is a simple voicemail service that takes a message when you’re line is engaged or there’s no answer. If you’ve already got 1571 then you can’t turn it on or off, and BT now charges £1.75 a month (rising to £1.85 shortly) for the privilege of having it.

Having bought the new BT 8500 anti-junk phone call system with four extensions, 1571 gets in the way of the answerphone, or 1571 kicks in and takes a message before you've had time to answer the phone. Time to get rid of 1571 and save £22 a year.

Needless to say BT doesn’t make it easy to cancel the service. Rather than trying to ring them, you can get rid of 1571 by logging into your BT account online.  Find your way through to My BT and access your phone line’s account details. There you will find details of any existing services that relate to your phone line, so aim for Change Your Calling Features and make as if you are placing a new order. An option will be found low down on the order form to Cancel 1571. Simply select that option and place an order online.

The web page promises you can review your order before completing but when I chose to See my Order Details it didn’t in fact show a preview, so I couldn’t confirm that I wanted to cancel 1571 before I placed the “order”.  It takes five days for cancellation to work through the system.

BT continues to hike its prices and penalise its regular customers for their loyalty. Previously Caller Display was free for home users if you knew where to look, but that now costs £1.75 a month too as BT continues to milk its captive audience.  You need this (aka BT Privacy at Home with Caller Display) if you use the new BT 8500 anti junk call system. BT’s offer to register you for free with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) as a privacy measure is near worthless as you can do it yourself, and we still get International junk calls as the TPS doesn’t apply to them anyway.

However the BT 8500 is looking promising and I’ll post more on defeating the menace of junk calls soon!

Update on Monday, October 20, 2014 at 3:37PM by Alan W

BT 1571 cancel FAIL

I duly cancelled 1571 as above. Everything then went wrong as my BT 8500 system flagged every call as ‘No Number’ and even Allowed numbers could not get through. Currently I have lost as many genuine calls as junk ones.

More worrying, one person told me when she tried calling me on her (Allowed Number) mobile phone, apart from the Call Guardian announcement, she then got the voice menu to enter a PIN and access voicemail.

So I had to endure the total nightmare of trying to speak to a human bean at BT on 0800 800 150.  Their voice recognition system asks, why are you calling? Best way of getting anywhere was to say ‘I have a problem with my service’ and then you get queued at an Indian cell centre, who were (TBH) very polite and helpful.

Bottom line, apart from cancelling my 1571 BT also cancelled by mistake the essential Caller Line ID which I’d also paid for till the end of the year. They offered to re-enable it and give it free for 12 months. They will rebate the unused portion of 1571 too.

So with a proper system working let's see how BT8500 gets on. Some reports of inconsistencies on the BT forums are a little bit worrying.....