ireland phone

can someone please tell me how much it costs a minute to call the tvx girls either from a mobile or landline from ireland? it says 75 p for uk i know but wat about ireland? please help

hi babe this is Emma butt,i have just read your post and its 75p from a bt land line £1.50 from a mobile other networks may very.i think its the same that goes for people that call from Ireland hope this helps you. x x x

And here's a longer answer:

Calls from a mobile will always cost more, unless they are to a regular mobile on the same mobile network, or to a number that has been set up for mobiles (and includes your network).

Premium rate numbers start with 09xx (formerly 0898) in the UK, and 15xx in Ireland. You cannot call any country's premium rate services from outside that country (as far as I am aware), and abuse is watched for very closely by the phone companies and service providers involved.

The per-minute cost is divided up between the phone companies, service providers, and operators.
They don't work from phone boxes or over prepaid calling cards.

Ireland's 15xx prefixes usually have more charged per-minute the higher the 3rd digit is, and 1559 is dedicated to sex lines.

As an alternative to national premium rate numbers (which would require one number to be set up per country), most of the "TV Babe" channels use an international number (starts with 00), and show it on screen as being for callers from Ireland. Most of them use country codes for small islands in the South Pacific, where a tiny local population allows for very short numbers, so even with all the codes in front, it doesn't look too obvious on a phone bill (until you see the price and the distant country that is).
There have been cases of island locals getting strange phone calls at all hours and complaining, but for a very small population, their link to the rest of the world is being subsidised by the profits from all the calls that aren't wrong numbers.

Unfortunately, due to widespread abuse by computer virus "dialers", most of these country codes have been blocked across the board by Eircom, and you have to ask Eircom (or your phone company) to unblock them before you can call them. So either you have a mate living in Fiji, or you are a perv

Country codes are in the front of the phone book, and rates are listed on the back of your bill.
There's more info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premium_rate
The bit at the bottom about international calls is interesting: it implies that the calls don't always go halfway around the world (you just get billed as if they did).

I asked someone who works in "the industry" (not sex or chat, but there's lots of premium rate text involved) and got more info:

RegTel (the Irish equivalent of Ofcom) has a strict code of practice, including NO 1-2-1 LIVE CHAT SERVICES. Dating services (recorded voice mail) are very popular here, as are live Psychics services. Some of the UK babe channels use Irish 15xx numbers for the clean daytime chat, but not at night.

Adult/sexual text services in Ireland get a short code of 59xxx (similar to the 1559 prefix for adult phone lines) which has to be a joke: they could have made it 69xxx and 1569 to make them more obvious and attractive to adult providers, but they went for 59 instead of 69. Kind of like the one where a 59 is like a 69 "but I need to borrow a tenner"...

The RegTel site allows you to look up who each 5-digit SMS short code is allocated to, with a support phone number and email address. If a provider doesn't have a normal-tariff number (staffed during office hours) they don't get given a 5-digit short code.
http://www.regtel.ie

The most common international prefix used is for St. Helena (a British Overseas Territories island between Africa and Brazil which can only be reached by sea).
Look at how many local number prefixes there are versus international premium ones:
http://www.wtng.info/wtng-290-sh.html
Ofcom are announcing changes to St. Helena codes, so calls to +290-xxxx numbers probably get routed via the UK anyway, and calls to the premium-rate ones can then be sent on to the live onscreen presenters without going half way around the world (but Cable&Wireless can still take a chunk of the call costs as if it did, and use that profit to cover the cost of the real link to the island).