Yesterday I posted about Telecom New Zealand's lack of a "meter" for their mobile data. Here is something that I thought would illustrate the issue well...Let's say you rent a car on a monthly basis, for work. You agree to pay $49.95 a month if you drive up to 1,000 km per billing cycle, and $1 per km after this.
You decided on 1,000 km because you thought this could cover your average daily usage multiplied by the number of days in the month.
You get the car and notice there is no meter in it, but the rental agency tells you it's ok, they are monitoring it within their system, remotely.
You drive away. During 30 days you have no exact idea of how many kms you've done. You have to keep calling the company to find out how many kms you have driven so far, and calculate to see if you are still within the expected average.
Then you receive the monthly bill. You look through five pages for something that says "kms driven this month", but instead you find "times you started the car this month". And a charge for the rental.
Does it make sense?
No. Neither does Telecom New Zealand's "data sessions" line in the bill. They don't tell us how many megabytes or gigabytes we used during the month, only how many times we used it during the period.
Telecom, are you going to fix your systems?
Vodafone Broadband Bandwidth meter: Total crap
I noticed that there was an issue currently occuring with the Bandwith meter for the 24th and the 25th:
Bandwidth issue 2008-07-25 11:32:57
Some customers may notice that their bandwidth for the 24th and 25th of July is higher than usual.
We are currently investigating this issue with our Engineers and we hope to resolve this as soon as possible
Thank you for your patience
While the meter in the picture below only accounts for my PC only (out of two), I am the biggest user of this household, so you could multiply the figures in my meter report by around 1.5.
Do note that my meter report may have slightly higher usage than the actual one as some packets may not be going to the Internet.
It sometimes fluctuates below my own PC's usage... and the 24th has a sudden peak spike (but the days before it were pretty unaccounted for)
Also, the 22nd of July is missing! Where did that go?
Some dates also seem to have huge delay in processing the usage (so sometimes the usage on one day goes on the next day).
I've seen problems with ihug's/Vodafone's usage checker a few times before. I haven't seen many occurrences of other ISPs having similar problems...
This also reduces the trust laid upon Vodafone's systems. I definitely know that I'll need to use my meter to check for usage rather than My Vodafone. Could this mean that we could be paying more for our data? (as if there is substantially more data usage than the actual one, then Vodafone have actually been taking away the value of the plan)
Vodafone's engineers better rectify this problem soon!
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