Minimum data charges on Vodacom and MTN
When mobile networks bill you for services, they must decide what the smallest billing increment will be.
For voice services, most tariff plans bill per second, rounded to the nearest cent.
Data services are billed by usage, and Vodacom explained in 2014 that billing systems can’t feasibly track every byte consumed.
Vodacom said a data usage growth from 1 million users at an average speed of 500kbps, to 15 million users at an average speed of 5Mbps would require a 150-fold increase in the potential peak billing record rate.
That is an increase from 62.5 million records per second to 9.375 billion records per second. Billing systems would not cope with this demand, said Vodacom.
To decrease the load on their billing systems, networks standardise a minimum billing increment – in Vodacom’s case, this is 10 kilobytes (KB).
Unlike voice services, however, it is not always possible to consume an amount of data when you are being billed out-of-bundle that amounts to less than one cent.
In the event that a data session ends before a cent of data is used, through the network connection dropping or a failed handover from one tower to the next, for example, most operators round up to R0.01.
This also applies to usage that comes to a fraction of a cent – networks typically round up to the nearest R0.01.
Billing increments
In its terms and conditions, MTN states its data billing rule is:
Volume-based ad hoc and out-of-fair use service data sessions are charged at the published rates in 1KB steps with a R0.02 VAT Exclusive minimum charge for access and rounded up to the next cent at the end of each data session, excluding the minimum charge.
This means that MTN effectively has a R0.03 minimum charge, including VAT, for data usage.
Telkom’s rules are also different from other operators, in that it has different minimum billing increments for different rating groups – which vary by product.
Examples of rating groups include Free, Charged, Peer-to-Peer, and TI Entertainment, Telkom told MyBroadband.
The minimum unit for “normally charged” data on a SmartPlan 100 package is 36,158 bytes, and this is the typical minimum unit for most products.
An example of an exception is Telkom’s Smart OneRate Extreme plan, which has different out-of-bundle rates and a minimum unit of 80,660 bytes.
Vodacom and Telkom confirmed that they measure 1 kilobyte as 1,024 bytes, as per the IEC and JEDEC standards for binary prefixes.
The table below details the minimum billing units and minimum charges for a data session on South Africa’s mobile networks.
| Network | Minimum billing increment | Minimum data per session |
|---|---|---|
| Vodacom | R0.01 | 10KB |
| MTN | R0.03 | 1KB |
| Cell C | R0.01 | 25KB |
| Telkom | R0.01 | 35.3KB (36,158 bytes) |
Now read: MTN promised to stop “disappearing airtime” – We tested its claim
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