A lesson in checking your phone bill instead of paying and forgetting. Photo / 123RF
A lesson in checking your phone bill instead of paying and forgetting. Photo / 123RF
OPINION
You have kids or run a small business with staff and need to equip everyone with smartphones.
Do you set up a separate account for each person? Or is life too short and since you pay the bills anyway, get a group plan which is one account for multipleusers?
Yes yes, a group plan means all your eggs in one telco basket but it’s convenient.
Convenience won, and your technology correspondent ordered a companion plan from One NZ.
With that seemingly simple move began a trip down the telco billing rabbit warren, accompanied by the realisation that you really should’ve scrutinised past bills carefully and not just done the pay and forget thing.
That became clear when it was time to pay the additional charge for the companion plan.
While I expected a higher bill, I was stunned to see it was almost twice as high as usual.
On top of the current month’s charge, I was miffed to see that One NZ wants to be paid in advance for companion plans. On a postpaid monthly account? Surely not! Why didn’t anyone tell me that this would happen?
The two One NZ customer service reps I spoke to about this were adamant that this is how their billing works and that’s that.
Well, so it is. After trawling through old bills going back to 2015, I was miffed with myself for having missed that I’ve been charged in advance for my regular plan as well for years now.
In other words,”on account” and “pay monthly” do not imply “postpaid”, and haven’t done so for some years now. That’s if you’re with One NZ. Spark too is upfront about charging in advance like that.
Essentially, you can only buy prepaid mobile plans from the two. The only postpaid items in a “billing cycle” are out-of-plan charges, like sending expensive MMS messages to green bubble Android users.
”On account” and “pay monthly” do not imply “postpaid”. Photo / 123RF
After speaking to some heavy duty telco geeks about this I felt a little less stupid. They too checked their bills, and were surprised to be paying in advance for their plans.
Was it always like that? No. Telecom’s landline plans might have been, but Spark’s website still has a business mobile postpaid agreement page, from 2015.
Also, a friend recalled how not that long ago Vodafone would give business customers two months after the invoice date to pay their bills.
Nowadays it’s pay in advance and on time too or you get cut off fast with a late payment fee slapped on.
Wage slaves paid weeks in arrears and businesses having to wait three to six months before invoices are settled by big companies can only dream of terms like that.
Back to group plans, there are some things to bear in mind. First, the only variable you can play with is the number of members to add. It’s not possible to get, say, a main plan with unlimited data, voice and texts, and then add cheaper, capped plans for group members, or the other way around.
Instead, all members get the same features that the main plan has. Which is both good and bad, but flexibility here would be nice.
While the main plans don’t go up in price, member ones have. One NZ bumped up their member plans recently by $5 a month I discovered while looking through the nitty gritty details of the companion plans.
Keep an eye too on zombie add-on services attached to your main account being reanimated.
One such service, International, at $9 a month appeared on my One NZ bill, again payable in advance but credited out.
It turned out not to be a spurious roaming charge, but something called TalkNTxt that offered a small amount of “free” overseas voice minutes and texts.
Is TalkNTxt from an older plan gestated deep in the maw of Project SAM, a legendary billing system upgrade from the early 2000s which Vodafone oldtimers still have nightmares about?
Who knows but as far as I know I’ve never used TalkNTxt, nor have I seen it listed on prior bills. Can’t get rid of it either. Thank goodness a $13.49 a month WiFi hotspot charge that I can’t think why I bought (or did I?) years ago wasn’t resurrected as well.
Maybe this is a storm in a teacup, but it was surprising to encounter such a bumpy ride for what seemed like a simple plan change.
In the end, it was worthwhile taking the time to go through the details on group plans, to compare what the three telcos offer.
2degrees has now assured me twice that they do not charge in advance, so they’ll get my business, courtesy of New Zealand having made phone number porting mandatory to increase competition. What’s more, there’s a welcome saving to be had on top.
A cautious thumbs-up for competition in a small market, in which mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) have struggled to make any real headway, and probably never will.
