Are the phone companies charging at the advertised rates?

 By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

01 May 2011

Bryan Muhandale has been trying to figure out how the telephone companies charge for their services. He writes: “most service providers are currently charging Sh3 per minute which works to 5 cents per second. Since the billing is ‘per second’, it means that once a call has been made, the amount should reduce in multiples of 5 cents.

“If I buy a line and recharge it with say Sh100.00, every call made should result with a balance in multiples of 5 cents; e.g., if the call lasts 43 seconds then the total charge is 43 x 5cts =215cts hence the balance should read Sh100.00 – Sh2.15 = Sh97.85. And so on.

“My question is, with the per second billing, how comes after making a call, the cents part of the balance sometimes returns numbers which are not multiples of 5? Please help unravel this mystery.”

First of all; Bryan’s assertion is not entirely correct. The calling rate is not a flat Sh3 per minute for all networks. The market leader, Safaricom charges Sh3 for “on-net” calls and Sh4 for “off-net”. Thus, If you have a Safaricom line and you call another network, you should be charged Sh0.067 per second. This is where the awkward balances will arise from.

Nevertheless, this opens a new line of inquiry: are the phone companies charging at the advertised rates? To find out, I did a quick test using my three lines, namely, Airtel, Safaricom, and Orange Wireless.

I made successive calls from these lines and checked the balances before and after the call. I also noted down the duration of each call. The results were as follows:-

Safaricom calling Orange Wireless: Duration = 17 seconds; cost = Sh1.20. This comes to Sh0.07588 per second or Sh4.235 per minute. Now this is higher than the advertised Sh4 per minute.

What if the Sh4 is before VAT? In that case the total cost would be Sh4.64 and not the Sh4.235 that I was charged. If we work backwards, we find that Sh4.235 is 5.88 per cent more than Sh4. I cannot think of any tax or statutory levy that attracts 5.88 per cent.

I repeated the test and a 19-second call was charged Sh1.33. This comes to Sh4.20 per minute – still higher than the advertised rate.

Thinking that the call timer was inaccurate, I tried the test using the Airtel line in the same phone. A 15-second call to Orange Wireless was charged Sh0.75. This works to exactly Sh0.05 per second or Sh3.00 per minute. This is precisely what the company advertises, so I concluded the time is correct.

Orange Wireless calling Airtel: Duration = 17 seconds; cost = Sh1.21. That is, Sh0.0712 per second or Sh4.271 per minute. Again, this is higher than the rate of Sh4 per minute advertised in the Orange website.

Clearly, some explanations are needed on how the telephone charges are arrived at.