Afrihost Mobile's plan to remove data bill shock

[Paul Hjul]

They polled their clients less than three weeks ago about the prospect, so it must have been important enough to them. Joke will be on Jan if he fell for a tweet campaign!

Can someone explain to me the risk of the OOB? If you are a contract customer to any of the cell providers, it means that they extend you some credit and invoice you monthly for the credit used. In terms of FICA, they must make sure that you can afford the credit. Signing a new contract with CellC a month ago, they limited me to R250 or something, until I requested them to increase it. If Gian's mom ran up credit to R7k, she might well walk away and say they never did a proper credit check on her and she cannot afford it. Seem to me that there should be a FICA-induced cap on all accounts.

My point about time lines is that IIRC the 7k OOB bill tweets predated the survey but are quite a bit after the question being earlier put to Afrihost about mobile offerings based on their moving to MTN.

As for the risk of OOB its a big problem with the providers imposing credit limits on accounts which seemingly does not stop the incurring of OOB charges if the charge happened in a single session which wasn't computed until the close which is then out of real time put onto the bill. My view is that this is reckless lending - I haven't really looked at whether it contravenes the National Credit Act but I suspect that if journalists dive into the question it will be said to be an illegal practice to send a bill in excess of the credit limit. Hopefully the OOBShark advocacy site which is coming up soon will put some fire on this.

 

[Skerminkel]

My point about time lines is that IIRC the 7k OOB bill tweets predated the survey but are quite a bit after the question being earlier put to Afrihost about mobile offerings based on their moving to MTN.

No, the tweets were this weekend and the poll around 25/7. Unless he repeated the tweets, but then they were quite obviously a scam. Good for Gian if he pulled it off. His mom might just get annoyed that she is used as Afrihost's Steve (a la FNB).

As for the risk of OOB its a big problem with the providers imposing credit limits on accounts which seemingly does not stop the incurring of OOB charges if the charge happened in a single session which wasn't computed until the close which is then out of real time put onto the bill. My view is that this is reckless lending - I haven't really looked at whether it contravenes the National Credit Act but I suspect that if journalists dive into the question it will be said to be an illegal practice to send a bill in excess of the credit limit. Hopefully the OOBShark advocacy site which is coming up soon will put some fire on this.

My thoughts exactly.

 

[antriksh]

This is awesome Afrihost we love you too. Have had an excellent experience with them on the broadband side.

go a month without realizing how much data you are using.

Make sure you install Onavo works brilliantly on iOS and Android. There is no Windows Phone equivalent grrrr .