Roaming is expensive? :) HAHA rip off!

V

vision83

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Jun 2, 2011
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I replied on a email about Billing guys returning my request for an investigation for Roaming calls... This something I explained:

According to all your data my total bytes was:
121881207

That divided by 1024 = 119024.616210937KB divided by 1024 again = 116MB

You are charging me for 116MB of traffic an insane amount. I know what bandwidth costs in Kenya and I know how the traffic is routed.

:-) I connected several operators in Kenya to Seacom. Kenya has better bandwidth and more traffic at a lower cost in most cases than back home here in SA.

So why charge me for a 116MB of traffic R10997.09.

I have asked them for a break down, I want to see who is to blame.. The mobile provider Safricom or MTN.. Someone is inflating the price.

Traffic on roaming is not routed all the way back to South Africa. While Roaming your traffic is routed out directly via your roaming mobile operator and from there onwards to his transit provider via seacom to London, where most of there internet breaks out for Kenya... So effectively the mobile operator Safaricom could charge me there local rates at no-loss of income and still make a profit. MTN could even add there own mark-up for provisioning the service. But somewhere someone is inflating the amount insanely high.

So we are all getting ripped off? Is nobody going to-do something about it?

Simply put, why is nobody making a stand? Some people are driving expensive cars all over by ripping us consumers off.

I will use a local sim traveling on business, but in the future I hope people can see the light.

Technically DATA roaming should not be so expensive. Everyone needs to know this, we are being ripped off. Just in this case I want to know who is responsible? MTN or Safricom? :-) So I can inform everyone on how much there profit margins are...
 
Old news mate, been like this for ages and many people have complained before you.

Hasn't made much difference.

Just get a local sim where ever you go, in many cases even the cost for calling home will be cheaper then when roaming.
 
actually, what happens is (THIS DOES NOT JUSTIFY THE INSANE PRICE) when you log in on the roaming network the network does a look up in the .gprs domain for the MNC your Sim card is associated to. Your traffic then gets tunneled from the roaming network back to your home network. This is very retarded, since

A) its always slower (in the case of SA, ALOT slower)
B) waste of traffic

The trick is when you land in Kenya get some Safaricom or something going and enjoy the REALLY REALLY cheap 3G.

It's MTN fault too, not Safaricom, all the networks have pre-arranged traffic rates. So Safaricom bill MTN X, MTN mark it up by infinity squared then give you the bill.

Safaricom and MTN go laugh and play in the money bags. Always remember all cellphone networks are pure evil put on the earth to destroy the human race. By the way that R94.80 per meg is lower than what you would have paid for with Vodacom. 116MB with Vodacom sim would have hit you for R14848.
 
it seems like you knew what you were getting yourself into,you just did it to experiment,you will get your brake down as it seems that's what you actually wanted...what a costly adventure,i also believe you are aware of the numerous threads about this issue on mybb,you sound like the kind of guy who never believed his parents when they told you 'fire its hot',trial & error sometimes have some nusty reasults
 
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