Back in May, the Australian Communication and Media Authority (ACMA) drafted a report that called for telcos to lift their game. Recommendations included ending advertising with misleading terms like cap or free, and notifying you when you’ve hit a certain amount of usage. The response submitted by the telcos was released this week, and included fun tidbits like “providing more information about telephone pricing and plans would only confuse consumers.”
The industry says that Australian pricing works differently to the US and Britain, and that easily comparable “unit pricing” is too hard to do here. The ACMA disagrees, and points to that cool research and infographic from WhistleOut, see: Mobile Plans: How Much Data And Calls Do You Really Get?
In addition, apparently the telcos are all for giving you tools to monitor your spending limit yourself, but it’s too hard for them to proactively send you text or email alerts. Pretty insulting, right?
The telco industry says it supports the ACMA draft, but wants its own self-regulatory code to address the concerns instead of government regulation. That code hasn’t been released yet, but the ACMA says it expects the industry to adopt the reforms or it will regulate. The battle lines are being drawn.
The ACMA and the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN) will meet next week to discuss the issue further. [SMH]
Trjn
Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 12:09 PM“providing more information about telephone pricing and plans would only confuse consumers.”
I assume the confusion will come from people wondering why there is such a convoluted and ridiculous pricing system in place once they actually look at the details.
Death Duck
Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 12:23 PMWell I’m with TPG and when I hit 80% of my call or data cap they always send me a text to let me know….
Uncle Bob
Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 12:27 PMInsulting to whom? People that are too intellectually challenged to understand that they should be responsible for their own financial expenditure?
People that are not intelligent enough to use the several tools they currently have available to them to check on their own use.
I doubt these same ignorant people they must be hand fed everything and have no responsibility for their own actions would be capable of understanding the supposed insulting comment.
That said, the Telco’s are full of shit, and choose not to do these things because they financially gain from the populists ignorance.
As any profit driven company would.
glennc
Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 10:45 AMso when a company is obviously deceiving the public, you are ok with that? being in marketing this sort of shit pisses me off.
bt
Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 12:29 PMTelstra offers the option of checking your call and data usage. But with call and sms usage their system has a limit of 255 records either call or sms. So send more than 255 sms and that’s all that will appear. It’s misleading that they tell you that you can check usage but don’t even provide the disclosure that it’s not even useful.
Grim
Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 12:38 PMNot being able to send out alerts is a joke. If you can tell me how much data and calls I’ve made at any point in a month, you can tell me when I hit 75% and 90% of my limits. They just don’t want to spend money on implementing such a system.
ErraticFocus
Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 12:58 PMI get usage limit emails from iinet when I use 90% of my on or off peak limit, the email has a link to my account toolbox online with history and usage information, I don’t want any more info than what I have at the moment, it’s perfect and unobtrusive.
I agree on more information for signing up to a new service though, and with some kind of standard set out so you can compare plans and find the right one for your needs.5
Phil
Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 1:33 PMGet the Mega900 CAP now! $900 dollars of value!
(20 included minutes at $45.00 per minute, excludes connection fee of $2.00, calls to other Telcos are excluded, 2Mb of Data included, additional data is $8/Mb unless it’s outside our limited network then it’s $20/Mb. Calling from abroad? Nor proiblem, but you’re going to have to reortgage your house if you want to attempt that. Only available on a 6 years).
Chris
Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 1:42 PMWhy don’t they just express value in minutes, the unit of charge (seconds, 30 secs, etc), how much date and how many texts?
The $ Value is meaningless.
Ash
Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 2:33 PMClassic Aussie Telco conduct towards consumers and regulation.
Does this mean as Consumers we can “limit the information Telco’s can store about us because it may confuse them”?
MDolley
Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 2:49 PMI think the problem is you can’t say X Minutes included because at the end of the day it IS a dollar amount that they are offering you (a problem with the linked infographic). The call to sms ratio varies person to person. I think the current CAP concept works as long as you aren’t stupid.
Maybe they should all use “Points”. The $49 Plan includes 5000 points. SMS cost 25 points each and calls cost you 60 points per minute.
Trjn
Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 3:18 PMThe main problem is that cap plans are not easily comparable.
Let’s say there are two plans by competing companies. One offers $90 worth of credit for $19 and the other $120 worth of credit for $24.
The first has 85c/min calls with a 15c flagfall, but the second has 50c/30 sec with no flagfall. SMSs cost 20c on the first and 25c on the second.
At a glance, which is better value?
What if you’re paying the same call and SMS costs but instead of a $19/mth fee for $90 worth of that usage you’re getting $500 for $45 on the first and $575 for $50 on the second?
The costs are hidden behind this layer of “cap value” so you’re told that it is 85c/min plus flagfal when it is effectively 17.9c/min plus flagfall under that $19 for $90 cap (or 7.65c/min plus flagfall if you have that $45 for $500 cap).
Why not just say “for $19/mth you get $19 worth of usage at 17.9c/min” etc? Adding points and whatnot is just ridiculous and obfuscating the cost to the user to make it harder for them to make an informed decision about the plan they’re about to buy.
Nate
Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 5:38 PMDon’t forget that if you were to go over your cap you would be charged 85c and not 17.9c per min.
I hate the fact that it takes up to 48 hours for my telco to update my data usage. You could use heaps of data in that time.
Adrian
Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 2:56 PMI was on $49 dollar cap plan with Optus (BYO phone so no handset repayments included). Almost every month I’d go over the cap. I changed to a corporate Vodafone plan and was paying about $10 a month for the exact same calls. The difference… $49 cap plan with optus was charging ~$0.36 for 30 seconds and the vodafone plan was charging ~$0.065 for 30 seconds. That is 6x the price for the exact same thing! Cap plans are a great way for telcos to hide their actual call rates.
Penmonicus
Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 3:47 PMUhh… what? That’s some crazy ludicrous plan you’ve got there.
~1c per second, charged in 30- or 60-second blocks is standard.
I don’t have a massive deal with the way the plans work – $X per month, texts are $Y each, calls are $Z per minute with a $Q connection fee.
One ten-minute calls costs me less than ten one-minute calls.
That said, I want them to cut the crap, cause I’m sick of seeing ads with giant [BS] numbers on them.
Trjn
Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 4:34 PMAmaysim charges 15c/min on their “As you go” plan.
Three charges 90c/min + flagfall for their $39/mth personal $250 cap plan and 15c/min + flagfall for their $40/mth business plan (which gets you $40 worth of calls/txts/etc).
Once you do a little maths to work out how much your cap “value” represents in real dollars, prices are pretty much universally sitting under 15c/min. Hell, if you’re on a high value plan, paying under 7c/min isn’t entirely impossible.
For the record, the $39/mth 3 plan works out to just over 14c/min call rate.
Trjn
Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 4:40 PMJust checked TPG, their $18.99/mth cap ($14.99/mth for TPG customers) works out to about 4.6c/min call rate assuming you only call non-TPG customers and an even lower one if you do call TPG customers (but a much harder one to calculate because of how their cap is set up).
Pinstripe819
Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 7:46 PMSome time ago I foolishly racked up slightly over $1000 in data charges on my iPhone.
3 Mobile was good enough to let me know.
After I exceeded $1000, that is.
Customer service WIN.
Jon
Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 7:58 PMIt would be so much easier if the telco’s just dropped the whole ‘cap’ plans and adopted minutes/texts like in the US and let people choose their plans, i.e. separate plan for # minutes, # text messages, # data.
Or they could just have set plans which have an allowance of minutes, texts and data.
That way we can all forget about call rates, flagfall and data rates (that is unless you go over your allowance).
MDolley
Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 8:30 PMI like the three part combo style idea. I could get crap all minutes, a heap of text and 3GB of data.
Neilo
Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 9:16 PMThings are simpler in the UK, a £30 plan will give you x minutes of talk time and y number of texts. There’s no flagfall charge and call times are measured in seconds rather than minute or 30 second blocks.
prashy
Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 8:19 AMI don’t have a problem with the network service I am getting with Telstra. But seriously it is ridiculous that us consumers expect to be given notice at every point of our usage. If you have a smartphone with internet, you have no excuse that you shouldn’t be able to check your usage at any given time. Most telco’s have apps or mobile compatible websites allowing you to check and there are even third party apps. The ONLY problem I have with Telstra is their incredibly poor customer service. YOU ARE NOT CUSTOMER FOCUSED, I have been told by people that have friends who do high level consulting for Telstra that they absolutely believe they are customer focused.
Dave Lord
Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 10:16 AMI was just filling my car with petrol when I was hit with a world shattering, history changing epiphany!
I have a brilliant marketing model for telco’s…
NO PLANS! NO CAPS! Just set a price per minute for calls, a price per SMS, and a price per Mb for data. Every smartphone on this planet is capable of displaying a meter to show usage. Then I can decide how much I want to spend, and stop when I have reached that limit.
It’s just like buying petrol, get it? They advertise a price. I decide which company I wish to purchase from. I use as much or as little as I want. Then I pay for exactly what I have used. What could be so hard about that?
I give this idea freely to the world. Don’t thank me… The only reward I ask for…. Vodafone, please deliver a usable signal strength to my house!
jeremy
Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 12:24 PMInsider tip – if you can, go prepaid. The rates on a “post paid cap” are generally the same as a prepaid of similar value if you shop around. Then set the prepaid to “auto topup” from a card. Same service as postpaid, far less bill shock. You have no lock-in, so can port easily to the next deal. Prepaid credit by definition is ALWAYS usable, even overseas. I can tell you from insider experience that telcos make upwards of 30% of thier profit on mobile services from overage on postpaid caps, an evil idea that had its origin in the less enlightened pre-trottling days of ISP until the regulators stepped in. That 30% number also hides some stunning stories of personal ruin – students with 30k bills, people in jail because the courts used “excess usage rates” to determine financial loss to carriers in fraud cases. Instead of a subsidised handset, buy a cheaper device outright – many more basic android phones are awesome value there.
Toast
Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 12:43 PMOne solution is deceptively simple: abolish flagfall.
If you get rid of flagfall, you gain the ability to convert dollars into minutes, and that way you can compare competing plans just based on minutes.
That’s how it works in the US. Minutes are the way to go.
Francis M
Friday, July 29, 2011 at 11:34 AMOK so if it’s so hard for the telco’s to implement services that tell you when you are running out of credit on Cap plans why is it that they can use systems to do exactly that for pre-paid plans ?
Other than the obvious that doing it for one makes them money (recharge) , the other would cost them (cut back on use, don’t go over the cap) !