Cellphone Bill’s, you get them every month without fail but for many years I’ve wondered what exactly the arbitrary numbers on my bill actually mean. It actually makes no sense to me why they make the bill so incredibly complex so as to confuse people. Today I decided to do an analysis of my monthly cellphone bill. Just to put it into perspective I pay R229 a month for the MTN 200 contract (where I get R200 to do what I need) and then a further R50 for 200 sms’s and R10 for a 10 meg data bundle. By my rudimentary mathematics that comes to R279.
Let’s cross off the contents on the bill. First up there’s the subscription fee which is R175.44 ex vat or R200 including. The extra fee for my E71 is R29 a month which is on the bill. So far, it makes perfect sense to me. Looking at the SMS bundle it costs me R50 and the data bundle is R10. Caller Line Identity is R8 and Itemised Billing is another R19.
Now here’s where it gets interesting:
Despite the fact that my contract was advertised at R229 INCLUDING CLI and Itemised Billing I’m still getting charged for it. I’m not even sure who to speak to to complain about this considering I have no way of getting the advert for my contract. Fact of the matter is that MTN hid these costs and frankly how the hell do they justify charging R19 for five pieces of paper. That however is a debate for another grumpy blog post.
Here’s the rub though: I’m getting charged a further 8 rand (not a lot of money but a principle issue) despite still carrying over an amount of R6. You see, I’m on a contract that gives you a specific amount of money to use and only after that amount is used up do they start charging you more money. Here’s the rub: I’m getting charged yet still carrying an amount over which frankly does not make sense. The situation gets even worse when you look at the itemised billing as everything is zero billed meaning that I didn’t go over my 200 allotted rands but yet I’m being charged. I’m frankly confused.
You see this is my issue: if MTN charges a mere eight bucks (which no one really cares about if they’re on a contract) they’re technically making extra millions per month. I’m not saying that this is what they’re doing but wouldn’t it be nice if cellphone companies actually made it easy to understand your bill? How about automatically adding vat into the individual prices and explaining why you charge despite carrying over minutes? Why not show which calls were charged for and an explanation on why I’m being charged for Itemised Billing and CLI. Considering this is one of the easier bills I’ve seen I should count myself lucky.
Just saying
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Can i tell you my favourite billing thing. MTN only credit your new free minutes on the 2nd of every month, now like myself im assuming that everyone starts going crazy on their bundles from the 1st! So they make 1 more day of crazy profits by being very sneaky. Its clever but pisses me off big time. There is no reason to credit our free minutes and bundles on the 2nd of the month other than to deceive us
Nashua Mobile are the kings of deceptive billing. My bills are always full of incorrect billing which is countered by credit notes for the incorrect billing, which they didn’t issue because of me querying anything. After a while I just say hey, the incorrect stuff looks like it might be covered by the credit notes and this thing is giving me a major headache, and I forget about it. Thieving bastards!