Internet cap for mobiles
Posted: August 13th, 2010 | Author: Bas | Filed under: Providers | Tags: Telstra | 2 Comments »TELSTRA’S 1.6 million iPhone and BlackBerry customers will have their internet access switched off if they overspend, because the telco has had enough of customers refusing to pay.
The “app cap” would apply to all so-called smartphones, barring users from the web until the following month.
“It stops the charge but it also stops the service,” Telstra chief financial officer John Stanhope told the Herald Sun yesterday.
Mr Stanhope said Telstra “didn’t want to intrude” into users’ lives, but it had been forced to act because it was losing tens of millions of dollars when its customers failed to cough up.
“There is bill shock. People go ‘Wow, I didn’t expect that size bill’,” he said.
Mr Stanhope admitted Telstra was partly to blame because it wasn’t doing a good enough job of explaining plans and costs to new smartphone customers.
He argued the app cap would benefit many customers by protecting them from big bills.
It was possible that users would be able to set the cut-off limit themselves.
And Telstra would increase its efforts to “educate” users about plans.
Telstra expects to have the cap in place by the end of this financial year — by which time it is likely to have more than two million smartphone users, with sign-ups growing 30 per cent a year.
Rapidly rising revenue from mobile web access was one of the few bright spots in the annual financial result Telstra reported yesterday.
The once dominant telco’s net profit fell 5 per cent to $3.9 billion.
Sales also fell – most notably from home phones, down $280 million, or 7 per cent, to $3.5 billion because a growing number of households decided to ditch landlines.
Householders who still had a fixed phone made on average six calls fewer a month.
The declines in the top and bottom line – when combined with management’s bleak outlook – triggered a 10 per cent plunge in Telstra’s share price.
That fall cost Telstra’s 1.4 million individual shareholders $3.9 billion.
Mr Stanhope revealed the app cap when explaining how Telstra would contain bad debts – $60 million in the last financial year.
While much of this was mobile web overruns, it wasn’t the sole cause.
Mr Stanhope said Telstra’s new billing system had been slow to send “treatment letters” – payment reminders, final warnings and disconnection notices.
That left Telstra without a leg to stand on when customers refused to pay.
Official complaints against Telstra to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman fell by up to 20 per cent in the latest quarterly statistics, but were still running at 435 a day.
Telstra CEO David Thodey said more work needed to be done. He said he was aiming to halve complaints from their present levels.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/internet-cap-for-mobiles/story-e6frf7jo-1225904665253
Few day ago some TPG Mobile customers started getting this message in their accounts at