If only US perveyors of long distance and cell phones even had 30 second billing in the US! Pretty much all cell phone carriers charge in full minute increments and also charge as "send to end" meaning they bill for calls even the connection and ringing time before the end party answers. Carriers have the ability to charge as accurately as they choose to, but do not choose to do so since it uses lots more minutes with the combination of full minute increment billing combined with send-to-end billing will assure the most possible revenue for all calls. I dare say that if people were charged the actual usage in minutes many people could conceivably sign up for plans with less minutes allowed per month at a lower rate.
Re: Full minute increment billing and send-to-end billing (was Aussie Telco brings back the 30 second rip-off) [Telecom]
Mar 30, 2009
1 Replies
I still find it incredible that unfair billing systems that were once necessary because of the technology involved are still in use, there is no excuse in this digital era for anything but per-second billing on all metered telco services.
Apart from the end-points of connections now (which are exclusively yours and the other party in the call anyway, and already covered by a rental portion of your monthly charges), most calls are carried on some sort of packet network so the concept that you are "using" a resource for a particular period is increasingly bogus.
Leaving a call up for 2 minutes of silence (which would cause little data flow in any packet based interconnection) gets charged as much as 2 minutes of constant talk (which would cause many, many more packets to flow), it just don't make any *technical* sense any more......
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