Fair use policy

This policy explains how inclusive and unlimited calling works on Olatti. It forms part of our Terms of Service. We wrote it so that a normal business, even a busy one, never has to think about it. It exists to stop the small number of accounts that would use a flat-price plan to run telemarketing, cold-calling or call-centre traffic, which would push up the price for everyone else.

1. What unlimited means

Where we describe a plan as offering 'unlimited' UK calls, we mean calls to UK landlines and UK mobiles, made by a person having a live conversation, in the ordinary course of your business, within the allowances in this policy. The Unlimited plan is priced so that you don't count minutes. The allowances below are set well above what a genuinely busy phone user gets through in a month, and they only matter if your use looks like a dialling operation rather than a team talking to its customers.

2. Your allowances

Each allowance is per user, per calendar month, and is pooled across all users on the same plan in your account. Three Unlimited users share one pool of 6,000 landline minutes and 6,000 mobile minutes; five Plus users share 5,000 and 5,000. Users on different plans have separate pools.

• Unlimited: 2,000 minutes to UK landlines and 2,000 minutes to UK mobiles, per user, per month. This is the fair-use allowance behind the word 'unlimited'. Crossing it does not stop your calls or cost you anything; see section 5.
• Plus: 1,000 minutes to UK landlines and 1,000 minutes to UK mobiles, per user, per month. This is an inclusive bundle rather than an unlimited plan. Once the pool is used, further calls are charged at our standard metered rates from your prepaid credit, and if you have no credit, outbound calls to chargeable numbers stop until you top up.
• Metered: no inclusive minutes. Every call is charged at our standard metered rates from your prepaid credit.
• Free trial: 100 landline minutes and 50 mobile minutes for the trial period, so you can try the real thing.

Minutes are counted per call, rounded up to the next whole minute. Inbound calls are not counted against any allowance. Calls between users on your own account are free and not counted.

3. What counts as a UK call

Inclusive and unlimited calling covers:

• UK landlines: geographic numbers beginning 01 and 02.
• UK mobiles: numbers beginning 07 on the four UK mobile networks (EE, O2, Vodafone and Three) and on the virtual networks that run on them at standard rates, such as giffgaff, Tesco Mobile, Sky Mobile, BT Mobile, iD Mobile and SMARTY.
• Freephone numbers beginning 0800 and 0808, which are free to call and not counted.

Everything else is outside inclusive and unlimited calling and is charged at the rate on our rate card, from your prepaid credit. That includes:

• Non-geographic numbers beginning 03.
• Service, business-rate and premium-rate numbers beginning 084, 087 and 09, and directory enquiries beginning 118.
• Personal numbering and pager services beginning 070 and 076.
• Mobile networks our carriers rate above the standard UK mobile rate, including Lycamobile and Lebara. The current list is on our rate card.
• Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man, which are outside the UK for calling purposes, including their 01 and 07 number ranges.
• International and satellite destinations.

4. Normal business use

Olatti is built for people talking to people: a team calling its customers, suppliers and colleagues. That's what the plans are priced for. The following are not normal business use, are not covered by any inclusive or unlimited allowance, and are not permitted on the Service without our prior written agreement:

• Telemarketing, cold calling, lead generation by telephone, market research calling, or any campaign of unsolicited calls, whether by hand or by machine.
• Operating a call centre or contact centre, or using Olatti as the outbound dialling layer for one.
• Auto-diallers, predictive diallers, power diallers, robocalls, voice broadcasting or any software that places calls without a person starting each one.
• Calls without a continuous live conversation between people, such as leaving a line open as a monitor, intercom, baby monitor or transcription feed.
• Trunking or continuous call forwarding, such as routing another phone system's traffic through Olatti, or forwarding calls in bulk to numbers outside the UK.
• Reselling the Service, or sharing a user's login so that several people call as one user.
• Artificial inflation of traffic, calls to revenue-share numbers to earn a payment, or any pattern designed to generate termination revenue.

Our Terms of Service list other prohibited uses, including nuisance, fraudulent or unlawful calls, which apply on every plan regardless of volume.

5. If you go past an allowance

On the Unlimited plan, the allowance is a marker for review, not a cut-off.

• We show you where you are. Your account admin can see usage at any time, and we send a notice when your pool reaches 75% and again at 100%.
• Your calls carry on. Reaching or passing the allowance in a month does not interrupt calling and does not create a charge.
• If it keeps happening, we talk. If an Unlimited pool is exceeded in two consecutive months, or in any three months out of six, we will contact your account admin, explain what we're seeing and agree a way forward. That is usually one of: confirming the use is legitimate and leaving things as they are, moving to metered rates for calls above the allowance, or adding a calls bundle sized for the way you work.
• If we can't reach agreement. If we have written to you and heard nothing within 14 days, or use continues to exceed the allowance after we've agreed a change, we may, on 7 days' notice, charge calls above the allowance at our standard metered rates from your prepaid credit. We won't backdate charges to months before that notice.

On the Plus plan, the allowance is an inclusive bundle. Once your pool is used up, further calls are charged at our standard metered rates from your prepaid credit, and if you have no credit, outbound calls to chargeable numbers stop until you top up. That is the same as the Metered plan. Inbound calls, calls within your account and emergency calls are never affected.

6. Abuse, fraud and security safeguards

Two kinds of safeguard sit alongside the allowances, and they apply on every plan.

Prohibited use. If we reasonably believe an account is being used for any of the purposes in section 4, we may restrict outbound calling on that account immediately, ask for information about the use, and charge the use at our standard metered rates. If it continues, or is serious, we may end the Service under our Terms of Service. These are the accounts this policy exists for, and we act quickly to protect the price for everyone else.

Automated protection. Our systems watch for patterns that indicate a dialling operation or a compromised account rather than a team making calls: an unusually high number of outbound calls from one user in a day, a large proportion of very short calls, calls to a very large number of different numbers, or calling that continues around the clock. Separately, if a single user's outbound calling in a month reaches twice the Unlimited allowance (4,000 landline or 4,000 mobile minutes), outbound calling for that user is paused until we've confirmed with your account admin that the account is secure and the use is yours. This is a fraud control, not a charge. Inbound calls, calls within your account and emergency calls are never paused.

7. Long calls

There is no limit on how long a call can last. To protect against lines left open by mistake, a single call that has run continuously for more than four hours may be disconnected. You can simply call back.

8. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time, for example if our carriers change how they rate certain numbers. We will post the updated policy here, update the effective date, and give you reasonable notice of any change that reduces an allowance or materially affects you. Our Terms of Service explain your rights if a change disadvantages you.

9. Questions

If you're not sure whether the way your team works fits this policy, ask us before you sign up at hello@olatti.com and we'll tell you straight. Most teams are well inside it.

We UC Ltd, trading as Olatti. Ariadne House, Town Quay, Southampton, SO14 2AQ, United Kingdom. Registered in England and Wales, company number 15200847.