Month End Data Reset

[dEaThXc0rE]

Hi All,

So I saw this post on Facebook that said something like, "Come month end, Pick n Pay does not come and take away all the groceries that you did not use/consume during the month, so why do mobile operators reset your data at the end of the month". And yes, it sort of makes sense. My contract's data does not carry over, but I especially paid more for a contract with more data meaning data is important to me but yet if I don't use all of it, I lose a couple of GB's a month.

Unless I'm missing something really obvious, I can't actually think of a mutually beneficial reason for them to do this?

Thoughts/Opinions?

 

[Johnatan56]

It won't be mutually beneficial, mobile operators make more money by allowing the data to expire as for e.g. contracts most users don't use up all their data. Now imagine it rolled over and they have to make sure to cater for some user not using their 1GB of data for 23 months of the 24 month contract. Instead of handling 1GB of data a month, that user could freak out and want to download 24GB in one month, maybe even a day for one large download, putting a lot more strain on the network than anticipated.

If the data limits start getting bigger, think of things like the ADSL operaters, e.g. on Afrihost I used to have it that the last two days of the month everything slowed down to a crawl as everyone tried to use up their cap. Roll-over helped a bit with that for one month, then did nothing for it the next month as it expired again. Now think of someone queuing their 150GB cap rolled over for 23 months all for one month. Should be fun.

Of course that's usually edge cases, most users would just downgrade their data caps, which would result in less revenue for operators.

I am not saying that it should expire, I don't think it should, it's just beneficial for the operators if it does.