My parents-in-law have had a frustrating service on their phone line for about 15 years. Whenever they make an outgoing call on their landline, once completing their outgoing call they then get a call back which tells them how much the outgoing call cost.  Apparently they had the line feature put on their telephone line when they were customers of a small Openreach-based phone service provider, and they’ve since gone back to BT and the line feature followed them.

They’ve called BT in the past and asked for the feature to be removed but the Help Desk staff have (as always) been useless and unable to disable the service. I’ve even tried searching online in the past to find out what the name of this calling feature is so I can advise them on what line feature needs removing to tell the Help Desk staff, but identifying the line feature has been very difficult. I don’t work for a telecoms company any more and I don’t have access to the WLR feature list, so to date I have been unable to find the exact name of the line feature.

Fast forward to today, and I’ve just returned from spending a long weekend with the wife and folks-in-law and I got to encounter the feature first hand. Once the outgoing call ends, Digital Dot [the automated BT lady] calls back and says something along the lines of: “Your call lasted for 16 minutes and cost £1.92”. Now knowing the exact phrase used, I was able to refine my search and finally identified the line feature as BT Charge Advice.

In this day and age of inclusive minutes calling plans on landline services, this line feature is redundant. Should you ever want to enable it (in advance of a potentially expensive phone call for example), you can do the following…

To enable BT Charge Advice

1. Pick up your BT Land Line Phone
   (this can be any land-line phone service that runs on the Openreach network – eg; BT, Sky, TalkTalk, GiffGaff, PlusNet, etc).
2. Dial: *411#   (Star, 4, 1, 1, Pound)
3. Call the short code.
   (Digital Dot should then tell you the feature is now enabled).

To disable BT Charge Advice

1. Pick up your Phone
2. Dial: #411#   (Pound, 4, 1, 1, Pound)
3. Call the short code.
   (Digital Dot should then tell you the feature is now disabled).

The above enable/disable actions will add or remove the “Your call lasted for” BT Charge Advice calls from your land line.