Don’t Be a Victim of Telecom New Zealand
December 6th, 2010This is off topic for most of you, but for people in New Zealand who use Telecom: I have gotten the Commerce Commission involved this time.
Cross check what Telecom is reporting your XT usage to be vs. what they are billing you for. Maybe some households wouldn’t notice a NZ$36 Christmas bonus for Telecom on their bills, but it stood out like a sore thumb on ours. This charge was on the last page of the printed bill in a field called, “IP Packet Data calls.” They don’t tell you how much data you are alledged to have used.
Our plan is for 8192MB and we used 7742.3MB of data, according to the online system that tracks the usage on the account. We were under by 449.7MB.
I have to go shower after this ugliness. Nearly an hour on the phone with Telecom and a formal complaint letter with documentation to the Commerce Commission… In all seriousness, I need to bathe now.
It’s not so much the NZ$36, which Telecom credited back to me, after I nailed them to the wall. How many other people are getting the shaft in this manner without even knowing it? And even those who catch them in the act might feel physically ill at the thought of calling Telecom. Anyway, that was it for me. (I wish I had directed my wife to remove the children from the room.)
The point of me mentioning this is to get more people in New Zealand to report these incidents to the Commerce Commission, which is capable of dealing with Telecom.
This is part of the autoresponder message that came from the Commerce Commission after I sent in the documentation of what Telecom tried to do to us:
Information from the public is often the first indication of a problem in the marketplace and may provide the initial evidence to begin an investigation. Thank you for taking the time to pass your information on to us.
We have to report these incidents. Telecom is probably expecting people to just be satisfied with account credits when they get caught swindling. Unless there is a threat of criminal or civil proceedings, however, Telecom will just keep doing this kind of thing to other people.
If Telecom has ripped you off, collect your documentation and see: Making a Complaint to the Commerce Commission.
good on you, Kevin, for taking the extra time and effort to register your complaint with the CC.
Telecom, like most privatised former state phone monopolies, are a criminal enterprise. organised crime. or disorganised, as the case may be. there are both types, imo.
anyway, they are truly scum. just like the NTT scum here i can never seem to totally escape from. mafia racket, by any definition.
I’ve dealt with companies in the data services industry since 1998, sometimes as the head of IT for organizations. I’ve never encountered anything like this. I have never said to a vendor, “Your organization is a public menace. I am going to the authorities.” But I said it yesterday while talking to Telecom.
In my letter to the CC, I encouraged them to try to get the conversation that I had with Telecom. Whether Telecom records them or not, I don’t know. But it would be priceless. I wish I had it.
They tried to flip me some ABSOLUTE NONSENSE about how they track the usage and how I must have made some mistake, and this is all my fault!
I’ve got the documents right in front of me, I undershot that limit by nearly half a gig, their own data shows it, there’s zero chance that this is my fault, and it dawned on me: This is not a company/customer relationship anymore. This is a shakedown. I need to call the police.
I didn’t even know who to call. I had to research who was responsible for dealing with these situations here.
i think that their brazenness just shows how little they get challenged over their scams. they don’t even have a plausible cover story or a polite apology in the offing, just in case someone cottons on and they need to stop things from escalating. they are this arrogant because they are used to getting away with this shit as a matter of right. no questions asked. sickening. surely there must be some consumer protection organisations who would give this publicity so that more people actually check their invoices before paying?
Telecom was created as a monopoly out of the old post office. (Here’s a rather detailed timeline: http://www.wordworx.co.nz/KiwitelcoTimeline.htm)
They’ve never been afraid to use their position in the market against competitors. Interconnection agreements (per-minute charges for calls inbound to a network) favour networks with a larger subscriber base. When Clear (now TelstraClear) started getting dial-up ISPs based on its network, the tables were turned as people left their machines dialed-in from a Telecom line to a Clear-hosted ISP 24/7 and the flow of interconnection charges changed direction. (Some ISPs were even free, presumably getting a cut of the interconnection revenue). So Telecom changed the rules and forced all ISP traffic onto another network with different interconnection agreements.
What’s interesting is that the same thing is happening now in the mobile market between 2degrees and the Telecom/Vodafone duopoly. 2degrees are currently holding a competition to see who can receive the most texts on their 2deg phone – essentially the same ploy as the free ISPs of the 90s. At $0.07 per TXT transit fee, it’s not hard to get into serious money.
how do these criminals justify charging seven cents to receive an SMS on their network? that must be a mark-up of what, a couple of million percent, after allowing for network depreciation?
I’ve been using TelstraClear for several years now, and have been very happy with them.
In case you aren’t aware, the major ISPs in NZ don’t all share the same overseas trunk lines. TelstraClear is one of the only ISPs that operates their own trunk — as a result, overseas bandwidth and latency tends to be much better than with Telecom or Vodafone.