A couple of years ago this was a topic of discussion. Parliament repeated asked Telkom if they could do an independent audit to see if Telkom was charging for such calls. For months, Telkom refused. Eventually, Telkom had to do something about the building pressure, and so Telkom conducted their own-commission audit. Here is a report of that audit:
"TELKOM-AUDIT
PRETORIA 27 October 1999 Sapa
AUDIT SHOWS UNANSWERED OR ENGAGED CALLS COST NOTHING:TELKOM
An independent audit proved beyond doubt that engaged or unanswered
telephone calls cost the consumer nothing, Telkom said in Pretoria
on Wednesday.
It said in a statement this emerged from 11100 calls made by an
outside company commissioned to do the audit.
The team logged the time, date, duration and status of each call,
and checked these against detailed billing printouts supplied by
Telkom.
"The entire exercise revealed that each of the calls billed for had
been answered, either by a device or by a recipient who had lifted
a handset while the caller was already replacing a handset,"
Telkom said.
"Customers are only billed for the time they spent communicating
across our network ... and not for unanswered or engaged calls."
Telkom said 1,34 percent of the 111000 calls were logged as
enganged or unanswered.
These were made to answering machines, numbers connected to modems,
alarm systems, faulty customer equipment, Telkom's diversion
service or to another call-forwarding facility.
Some PBX systems answered calls immediately and then supplied their
own ring or busy tone, Telkom said.
"Some callers, not realising that the call has indeed been
answered, terminate the call without speaking to anyone, and later
query that fact that they have been billed."
Telkom said some calls lasting between one and five seconds were
found to have been answered by voice-mail. These were registered
as successful calls, and were billed accordingly.
The audit was commissioned in response to persistent accusations
that Telkom billed customers for engaged and unanswered calls.
A spokeswoman declined to reveal the cost of the audit."
Funny, if Telkom was so confident that they were not charging for these calls, then why wouldn't they allow parliament to appoint auditors? Why did Telkom run and hide and then commission their own auditors to do this study?
This is an old issue, but it seems to be coming up more and more in the public again.
