Tuesday 23 June 2015

Why phone companies won't take excess data charges from unused call credit

You know what would be awesome? If my additional data charges could be taken from my unused call credit on my mobile phone plan. See, I get about $300 of call credits on my phone every month, and I use maybe $20 of it on average. I also get 300MB of data and use about 700MB which, on my provider (Vodafone) means I get a $10 charge for an additional 1GB of data credit. So, I'm just thinking, why can't that $10 charge come from my unused call credit? I'll even let you triple the charge if it makes you feel better.

Of course I know why this doesn't happen: revenue. If you start letting customers flex their charges between call credit and data, well, phone company revenues would take a hit. The only way to make it up would be if that type of plan attracted all the customers of other companies, too. Then, of course, they'd start doing the same thing and the only winners would be the customers.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And that sentence is board-room poison.
PPS - Still, it's nice to dream.

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