MTN has investigated a report of disappearing airtime on its network and found the cause to be an issue with its SMS charging system.<\/p>\n
An MTN customer recently contacted MyBroadband<\/strong><\/a> after noticing that his airtime balance was decreasing, despite him having active voice, SMS, and data bundles.<\/p>\n The customer recorded his MTN airtime balance over a 10-day period and found that his balance was depleting at a rate of around R0.10 per day.<\/p>\n This resulted in a total loss of R1.00 over the 10-day test.<\/p>\n Additionally, out-of-bundle data usage was not active for the user.<\/p>\n MTN executive for corporate affairs Jacqui O’Sullivan said the depleting airtime was caused by a problem with an SMS charging node.<\/p>\n “Upon our investigation, we have established that our customer\u2019s airtime was incorrectly depleted due to a faulty node which is used for SMS charging,” O’Sullivan said.<\/p>\n “The number format for the B-number was not being normalised to 083 format, but was instead being sent as 2783 which resulted in incorrect charging.”<\/p>\n “This node is one of eight which is used in a round-robin method for SMS charging,” she said.<\/p>\n O’Sullivan added that the node was detected and removed from traffic on 20 December 2019, which is why the customer\u2019s airtime remained unchanged from this date.<\/p>\n It is currently unclear how many customers were affected by the faulty SMS charging node, but MTN is investigating this to determine which users to reimburse.<\/p>\n “We have extended our investigation to establish the number of customers that may have been affected by this error,” O’Sullivan said.<\/p>\n According to the mobile operator, the error affected SMS services for a number of its prepaid and hybrid customers.<\/p>\n “Pending the outcome of this investigation, we intend communicating to affected customers regarding their reimbursement.”<\/p>\n MTN has investigated a report of disappearing airtime on its network and found the cause.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341028,"featured_media":281319,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[35863,35,42,203],"class_list":["post-335872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cellular","tag-disappearing-airtime","tag-headline","tag-mtn","tag-sms"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335872"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341028"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=335872"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335872\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":335978,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335872\/revisions\/335978"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/281319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=335872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=335872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=335872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Faulty SMS charging node<\/h3>\n
Customers affected<\/h3>\n
Now read: WhatsApp begging scam \u2013 Why Vodacom and MTN can\u2019t protect your number<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"