When mobile networks bill you for services, they must decide what the smallest billing increment will be.<\/p>\n
For voice services, most tariff plans bill per second, rounded to the nearest cent.<\/p>\n
Data services are billed by usage, and Vodacom explained in 2014<\/strong><\/a> that billing systems can\u2019t feasibly track every byte consumed.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n To decrease the load on their billing systems, networks standardise a minimum billing increment – in Vodacom’s case, this is 10 kilobytes (KB).<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n This also applies to usage that comes to a fraction of a cent – networks typically round up to the nearest R0.01.<\/p>\n In its terms and conditions, MTN states its data billing rule is:<\/p>\n 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This means that MTN effectively has a R0.03 minimum charge, including VAT, for data usage.<\/p>\n Telkom\u2019s rules are also different from other operators, in that it has different minimum billing increments for different rating groups – which vary by product.<\/p>\n Examples of rating groups include Free, Charged, Peer-to-Peer, and TI Entertainment, Telkom told MyBroadband.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n An example of an exception is Telkom\u2019s Smart OneRate Extreme plan, which has different out-of-bundle rates and a minimum unit of 80,660 bytes.<\/p>\n Vodacom and Telkom confirmed that they measure 1 kilobyte as 1,024 bytes, as per the IEC and JEDEC standards for binary prefixes.<\/p>\n The table below details the minimum billing units and minimum charges for a data session on South Africa\u2019s mobile networks.<\/p>\nBilling increments<\/h3>\n