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ellipsis

Ellipsis Regulatory Solutions
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Feel free to use this thread to discuss this forum, make suggestions about what you'd like to see covered in this section (we will try to do so, but make no promises), general discussions, airing your views, etc.
 
Exorbitant out of bundle costs

A personal bugbear of mine is the out of bundle (OOB) costs associated with mobile broadband. Having the most experience with Vodacoms' systems I will refer mostly to them, but the principal applies to the other providers as well.

When you take out a contract you are subjected to a credit approval process. So you might be approved for a fixed cost of say R500 which should allow you to take out a 2.3GB standard or 2GB advanced contract at R389 or R385 excluding other costs. If you elect to take the 2.3GB option your OOB rate is R1.20/Mb. So if you went over your allowance and used say another 1GB you would be liable for another R1200 on top of your monthly cost. In this case Vodacom will have over extended your credit limit by over 200%. Clearly this is a case of reckless lending.

To make matters worse there is no way for a customer to "hard cap" themselves. Any ADSL client will vouch for the fact that if your cap is 3GB you get capped at 3GB. Yet Vodacom has no system in place to enforce caps nor do they employ a real-time billing system for contract customers as they do for pre-paid. This means even if a client was paying close attention to their usage they could still easily go out OOB because billing can be delayed by up to 24hrs.

Vodacom and other providers are liable by
1) Not supplying contract customers with real-time billing
2) Not allowing contract customers to have their data hard-capped at limit of the package
3) Profiteering by allowing customers to run up excessive OOB bills due to the deficiencies in their systems as outlined above.
 
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You can have vodacom cap you you have to just phone them and tell them to cap you after your allowance i did it on a 1gig data contract
 
swim said:
You can have vodacom cap you you have to just phone them and tell them to cap you after your allowance i did it on a 1gig data contract
Click to expand...

The "cap" you are referring to is a Rand value cap not a data usage cap. Again the delayed billing also applies here so it's not a valid fix. This also gets really complicated if you have a voice contract with a data bundle and you want to limit data spend, but not voice. If you exceed your Rand cap due to OOB your whole account including unused talk minutes is suspended.
 
Tower Locations

ICASA should maintain publicly accessible, searchable maps of towers in the regulated bands. For a start I'd like to see the locations of television transmitters, cellphone network base stations and WiMax and iBurst towers.
 
MTN also does not have real time data as their prepaid customers have and sometimes is 10 days behind. Also sometimes a week is missed here and there with no data deducted but you are billed all at once 3 months later on top of your normal bill. Keep this in mind.
 
ginggs said:
ICASA should maintain publicly accessible, searchable maps of towers in the regulated bands. For a start I'd like to see the locations of television transmitters, cellphone network base stations and WiMax and iBurst towers.
Click to expand...

Wholly in agreement!
 
ginggs said:
ICASA should maintain publicly accessible, searchable maps of towers in the regulated bands. For a start I'd like to see the locations of television transmitters, cellphone network base stations and WiMax and iBurst towers.
Click to expand...

Good suggestion. Had some kind of own project on iBurst towers, but it died away.

Also, can be ASA section added?
 
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telkom should make 1Mb their starting speed for ADSL
then go to 4Mb and 10MB
they should also do away with ADSL line rental and capping.
if they do that, MyBB forums will hardly get any posts, as most people here post to vent/complain about slow speeds and excessive prices.
 
Thanks morkhans. This is a relatively complex one - looking into it and will come back to you.

morkhans said:
A personal bugbear of mine is the out of bundle (OOB) costs associated with mobile broadband. Having the most experience with Vodacoms' systems I will refer mostly to them, but the principal applies to the other providers as well.

When you take out a contract you are subjected to a credit approval process. So you might be approved for a fixed cost of say R500 which should allow you to take out a 2.3GB standard or 2GB advanced contract at R389 or R385 excluding other costs. If you elect to take the 2.3GB option your OOB rate is R1.20/Mb. So if you went over your allowance and used say another 1GB you would be liable for another R1200 on top of your monthly cost. In this case Vodacom will have over extended your credit limit by over 200%. Clearly this is a case of reckless lending.

To make matters worse there is no way for a customer to "hard cap" themselves. Any ADSL client will vouch for the fact that if your cap is 3GB you get capped at 3GB. Yet Vodacom has no system in place to enforce caps nor do they employ a real-time billing system for contract customers as they do for pre-paid. This means even if a client was paying close attention to their usage they could still easily go out OOB because billing can be delayed by up to 24hrs.

Vodacom and other providers are liable by
1) Not supplying contract customers with real-time billing
2) Not allowing contract customers to have their data hard-capped at limit of the package
3) Profiteering by allowing customers to run up excessive OOB bills due to the deficiencies in their systems as outlined above.
Click to expand...
 
ginggs

Agreed. To the best of our knowledge most of this information exists in one form or another in records at ICASA although the accuracy of this information is debatable.

We will follow up with ICASA and see what the current status is but a few things to note in the meantime
- ICASA is not really sure who is using what frequency at this time and their records showing companies licensed to use various bands are badly out of date in some respects. Have a look at the information which ICASA has published - http://www.icasa.org.za/tabid/394/Default.aspx and http://www.icasa.org.za/tabid/393/Default.aspx - as far as we are aware nothing else has been made public at this time.
- when a licensee makes, for example, an application for a point to point (PtP) link in say the 5.9 GHz band they will obviously have to specificy co-ordinates of the link (amongst much other information) and ICASA then has to assess - based on its database - whether the new link has the potential to interfere with existing installations, i.e. this information exists

it would be very useful for licensees to have this information available prior to making applications and it would obviously be helpful for a whole lot of other reasons

ginggs said:
ICASA should maintain publicly accessible, searchable maps of towers in the regulated bands. For a start I'd like to see the locations of television transmitters, cellphone network base stations and WiMax and iBurst towers.
Click to expand...

Shake&Bake said:
Wholly in agreement!
Click to expand...

Jagtiger said:
Good suggestion. Had some kind of own project on iBurst towers, but it died away.
Click to expand...
 
Speaking of putting a limit on your account.

I am with MTN on Autopage and I had a cap on my cell phone on Anytime 100 (my limit). What happened is that even though they told me that my limit was set it was not a certain whether or not it would actually work. This I was only informed after I made an inquiry to them about my R1,000 bill. I was supposed to pay only an extra R50 on what I am allowed before the out of bundle charges.

So, capping doesn't seem like a good option either.

This also raises the question of whether or not it is fair on the consumer for the vendor to make the limit work only at their discretion meaning the consumer is not sure whether or not the limit he/she requested will actually work?
 
morkhans said:
Any news?
Click to expand...

We raised the query with Vodacom, and got this response:
Although retail time billing is only available for Prepaid and Topup customers, we do have a call limit lock service for all customers which is fully functional. Customers with call limit locks in place not only have the ability to limit their data spend based on their preference but they also get SMS notifications advising them of both their voice and data spend.
Click to expand...
 
ellipsis said:
We raised the query with Vodacom, and got this response:
Click to expand...

Seriously? 8 months for that reply?

They know full well that the spend cap on post-paid only works for talk packages, not data packages. It is very easy to exceed your spend cap when using data because the session data is not updated real-time.

What about the fact that excessive OOB costs effectively equate to reckless lending? How can Vodacom get away with charging people R1k+ on a R149/m contract and not be in contravention of the National Credit Act?
 
There are some excellent "Studies and policy papers" on the Vodafone website -
http://www.vodafone.com/content/index/about/about_us/policy/policy_papers.html

Some of these papers study areas we are also dealing with at a regulatory level.
Also take note of when the older papers were published. Market conditions could have changed since the publication and hence the findings/conclusions may not be current.

WireFree
 
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