It keeps being said that the comms sector needs to restore the trust of ordinary phone users who have been battered with spam and scam voice calls and text messages. I am skeptical about the chances of success for one simple reason: how do comms providers expect to collectively restore the trust of the public when they cannot trust each other? An example of the sharp business practices that continue to undermine the smooth operation of the comms sector is the limited notice given when comms providers make exploitative changes to the duration increments used when billing voice calls to each other, or when they change the minimum duration charge for each call.
Naive members of the public will naturally assume that international calls which can be measured in seconds should be charged per second, and that the first second of a call will cost the same amount as the last second of a call. It has been a long while since I worked alongside people in wholesale billing, so I was bemused by the revelations shared by Alexandra Tokatlian of Orange Wholesale at the Global Solutions Council (GSC) Forum in Bucharest. Per Alexandra’s presentation, Orange had recently been confronted by demands for all of the following charging parameters.
- 60/1 i.e. a minimum charge equal to a 60 second duration and increments of 1 second thereafter
- 60/60
- 30/6
- 15/15
To make matters worse, the duration parameters may vary depending on the specific combination of the origin and destination for a call. There may only be 48 hours notice of a change. This leaves businesses scrabbling to update systems to correctly manage their costs. Errors become inevitable when complicated changes to the minimum duration and the duration increment are communicated through unstructured emails. There is not even a basic notation that carriers have agreed to use worldwide. The examples listed above follow the X/Y format, but Alexandra identified six different formats from a sample of 30 carrier price lists.
Business practices like these smell fishy. It seems to me that some comms providers are intentionally complicating pricing, and complicating the way they communicate about pricing, in the hope of tricking other comms providers into spending more than they need to. Businesses which cannot compete on price may resort to shenanigans to sustain their revenues instead of losing traffic to their rivals. This was epitomized by examples shared by Alexandra of carriers that seemed like they were intentionally making it difficult for notifications of pricing changes to be read.
As Alexandra pointed out, the uncertainty created by sudden pricing changes will have multiple implications for the risk profile of carriers. It may not always be possible to update systems to correctly calculate new costs in the time available. Billing disputes arise, and that will consume the time of staff as well as delaying settlement. Revenue leakage occurs. There is the ultimate and real risk of end users being dissatisfied as the prices they pay become less predictable.
Orange has tabled a series of common sense proposals to address these issues.
- A standardized method of communicating prices.
- A common format for the duration parameters communicated for both the sale and purchase of traffic.
- A minimum 30-day notice period.
These proposals make such good sense that we should feel some collective shame that they need to be made at all. There is nothing new about wholesale charges for voice traffic measured by duration. But instead of following a straightforward approach to communicating the essential facts about prices, it seems many parties still try to manipulate profit margins by playing games and cheating others.
A business that will not honestly and transparently communicate how much it charges for its services is a business that cannot be trusted to do all the other things that comms providers are now expected to do. There is a fire burning on the roof of the global communications industry but some continue to undermine its foundations.
GSC members can download Alexandra Tokatlian’s presentation from here.
