Beware the ISP billing policies

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mancombseepgood

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Just a note that I see TelkomSA bill per calendar month, so, if like me, you sign up on the 26th of the month, they bill you for a full month for the period 26th-31st! I have just been billed a second month just 10 days after the first one. Grrrrrrrrrrrr!

Which other companies do this? or is this the modus operandi for everyone?
 
For ISP accounts, this is usually the case. What other ISPs do is that they ask you when you want the account to be activated. It's quite annoying I know but nothing much you can do about it.
 
I can understand ISPs not charging pro-rata as it is possible to utilise the full bandwidth within a day or two depending on the package. However it should be something that they make you very well aware of.
 
Yeah, I agree, something Telkom does not do when you order online - they only want your credit card number
 
milomak said:
I can understand ISPs not charging pro-rata as it is possible to utilise the full bandwidth within a day or two depending on the package. However it should be something that they make you very well aware of.
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If the price is pro-rated, they'd pro-rate the bandwidth as well. But I guess some people might want their whole bandwidth, even just for that last day or two in the month? :-)
 
Cathryn said:
If the price is pro-rated, they'd pro-rate the bandwidth as well. But I guess some people might want their whole bandwidth, even just for that last day or two in the month? :-)
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That's exactly right. You must understand that when you buy ADSL from ISPs, you aren't purchasing time-based access, but rather x amount of gigabytes. You can use these in half a day.
 
They can surely sell 3 gigs of traffic with a 30 day window period?
Uh well, not in this country!
 
Calendar Month

Most ISP's work on the calender months, and the best thing is that having a 3gb account will normally be valid for 30 days but when you sign up during the month they bill you for the full 30 day period and you just have to pay up. Webonline when I sign up did have a option in there were you can decide wheter you want to be billed for the full 3gb or just a partial amount and they divide the 3gb in 30 and give you that amount of bandwith and you only pay for that amount of bandwith perhaps the other ISP's should purchase the billing software from webonline instead of trying to ripp of the clients.
 
When I had to consolidate 4 telkom adsl accounts in a single account on the 23rd of last month I inquired about this to the lady on the other end of the phone line and she said that telkom will only bill me a portion of the usual full price of the account, what portion was not clear, but it wasnt the full amount.
 
Most ISP's offer prepaid accounts, which are accounts without any time period on them, i.e. you buy 1GB and use it until it's done.

The reason ISP's work on a calendar month basis is to make money, they sell X amount of GB's their clients use Y amount of GB's and that's what they pay the supplier. Then X - Y = additional profit. It also means much cheaper accounts for their clients because they can work on economy's of scale rather than profit on a per GB basis.
 
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