Telecom data plans - consumers are taken for a ride
All of us would have experienced very high data charges in the bills related to mobile data and PC internet charges. And most such cases remain an argument between us and the telecom company.
The issues are;
- we as a consumer do not have a meter at our end. The software tools and apps are only the approximate data uses which are hardly synchronized with the meter at the billing center. There is always a disparity between what you measure at the consumer end versus the is actually been billed.
Why can not it be charged like water and electricity bills?
- We do crib that the actual use of data is very minimal for emails and few website browsing while the bandwidth usage shows few Giga Bytes. Actually, the OS, Office suite, Adobe tools, Java, Anti Virus and such software consumes lot of bandwidth for version updates, patches and security updates. Further, there are some grey data traffic like failed sessions ( signal problems or similar). Who has to bear the COST of such burdens?
- The data packages are billed on certain plan. We have to commit certain bill amount for the data usage caps like 1 GB plan, 3 GB plan, 5 GB plan, Unlimited ( only the name is unlimited ) plan etc. And if our usage is more than what is been capped, we get an unreasonably increased bill. On the other side, if we do not use the data bandwidth as per the monthly bill plan, we can not carry forward the remaining.
Are we taken for a ride? And believe me, none of the operators signup SLA for individual consumers.
The issues are;
- we as a consumer do not have a meter at our end. The software tools and apps are only the approximate data uses which are hardly synchronized with the meter at the billing center. There is always a disparity between what you measure at the consumer end versus the is actually been billed.
Why can not it be charged like water and electricity bills?
- We do crib that the actual use of data is very minimal for emails and few website browsing while the bandwidth usage shows few Giga Bytes. Actually, the OS, Office suite, Adobe tools, Java, Anti Virus and such software consumes lot of bandwidth for version updates, patches and security updates. Further, there are some grey data traffic like failed sessions ( signal problems or similar). Who has to bear the COST of such burdens?
- The data packages are billed on certain plan. We have to commit certain bill amount for the data usage caps like 1 GB plan, 3 GB plan, 5 GB plan, Unlimited ( only the name is unlimited ) plan etc. And if our usage is more than what is been capped, we get an unreasonably increased bill. On the other side, if we do not use the data bandwidth as per the monthly bill plan, we can not carry forward the remaining.
Are we taken for a ride? And believe me, none of the operators signup SLA for individual consumers.
Viewed by 90
Internet is as important as electricity and water, especially, for growing professionals. The young generation is critically dependent on internet for learning, work and home entertainment. Moreover, the way with which we communicate with each other is changing drastically and it is powered by internet. So is the billing and usage accounting practices are very important at this point of time. What if tomorrow your electricity and water distribution companies start billing on slab rates like 499 plan, 999 plan and so called unlimited plan?
Jun 30
Shashidhar is right. I have a Tata Indicom Photon, with a 2 GB plan. First of all, there are their own ad sites that open, like Yahoo, automatically, leading to waste of data usage. And once you take a data based plan, speed is extremely poor. For example, speed on my phone (non Tata) is 100 KBps, while my Tata Photon hardly reaches 100 kbps, about 12% of the speed of my telephone! ----- Original Message ----- From: Shashidhar Bhat To: rvg10000@gmail.com Sent: Sunday, June 29, 2014 10:03 AM Subject: New post "Telecom data plans - cons..." in [Aware Consumers of Delhi/NCR]
Jun 30
