Quack

This might seem a strange topic - doesn’t everyone love the pre-paid business because it eliminates things like fraud and bad debt? This was the question on my mind as I listened to a presentation from Telstra on this very topic at a recent Billing and Revenue Assurance conference. (more…)

OK, now I have seen it all. There are certainly moves about by regulators to put the onus on telecomms providers to protect their customers from overspending, or at least making them more aware of charges that are accruing. In principle, this is not unreasonable. (more…)

I’ve been slack. Very slack. After several months of sustained production, it’s fair to say I hit a patch of “writers’ block” when it came to material for the blog. There was enough going through my head, but the discipline of putting finger to keyboard seemed to fade. Then I read a fantastic quote from the great Jodi Picoult. (more…)

Those pricing people at Telstra continue to impress me with their cleverness when it comes to innovative and customer-friendly pricing changes … pause … NOT! (I just see Borat Movie; I like).

You just need to know a few small facts about voicemail calling patterns (more…)

The next generation of coverage, speed, services has brought us the next generation of mobile phone plans. No, the odd characters in the title are not shorthand for me swearing, but rather the mandatory footnote tags that appear in every single (mobile) phone advertisement you will see, referring you to the all important information in the footnotes. The beloved asterisk, dagger, caret, and pound symbol are essential qualifiers these days to what used to be simple words like “plan”, “fee”, “anytime”. Don’t you pine for the days when “anytime” actually meant “any time”?

The early days of mobile phone billing brought us my favourite item in the smoke-and-mirrors toolchest: 30-second billing. (more…)