Time to kill out-of bundle usage
If there is one thing that continues to irk me about the mobile industry, it is the concept of out-of-bundle minutes. The idea that when you use more than your allocated amount of minutes or MB in a given month you should be punished for making use of the service further.
It seems that this is getting a bit better. A quick look around at the various service providers and it seems that the gap between in-bundle minutes and MB and out of bundle usage is closing – but it is not anywhere close to what it should be.
Just to be fair here, the issue of out of bundle minutes is hardly the greatest evil that we have to contend with when talking about the mobile telecommunications industry. International roaming clearly wins that race followed closely by the terms and conditions of cellular contracts.
For me the issue of out of bundle minutes is a very simple one. If we were dealing with a finite resource, and you wanted people to use less of a specific resource, then raising the price once they reached a specific threshold would be the logical thing to do. This is something that you can see every month if you peruse your electricity bill, use less and you pay a lower rate, use more and the rate per kilowatt hour goes up.
I understand that the mobile operators want people to use their phones more when the network is not bust, that is why they have all these smart systems for their pre-paid users that give them discounts when they are using a cell that is quiet, either because it is in a remote area or because its 2AM and all the sane people are in bed.
I have never heard any of our networks telling us to make less calls. In fact everything they do is focused on getting us to use our phones more. So why are we being punished for doing what they asked us to?
The cynics among us could compare a cellular network to a drug dealer, they get us hooked on the drug (voice minutes and data) by offering us a cheap way to get connected and then pump up the prices once we are good and hooked.
Personally I think that out of bundle usage is simply a billing mechanism that was dreamed up in the early days of the industry and operators are simply too lazy to change it because it works and it brings in plenty of cash for them. It also provides the incentive for customers to upgrade to larger packages. Once you go out of bundle on your 120 minute package it is no time at all before you are spending more than someone on a 240 minute package, but getting less airtime for your money.
So I would like to propose a very simple system for getting rid of out-of-bundle usage forever. It is so simple that I can’t believe that no network has offered this before. You pay the lowest rate for voice minutes, SMS’s and data that you have paid during the month. The more you buy up front, the less you pay per unit and therefore the lower your out-of-bundle rate would be.
Lets use SMS as an example: if you have an SMS bundle that gives you 100 SMS for R20 (I am making up numbers here) that would equate to 20c a SMS. Now when you run out of that bundle you still pay 20c a SMS till the end of the month. The same with data; if you pay 5c a MB because you bought 5GB at the beginning of the month, you would continue to pay 5c a MB for the rest of the month.
This is a win-win situation for both the consumer and the operator, the consumer gets a better deal than they are at the moment and don’t have to go into financial paralysis when they go out of bundle because they are always paying the same rate. The operators, on the other hand, score because the consumers are incentivized to buy large bundles early in the month in order to get maximum benefit from the system.
I am sure there are a million flaws in this concept but I reckon it has to be better than what we have at the moment which is an unbalanced, flawed system which really makes no sense at all.
Time to kill out-of bundle usage << Comments and views
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