On the face of it Optus's change in how it applies its charges for timed calls from fixed home phones is of little consequence. Indeed, any Optus customer with a niggling doubt might find comfort in Optus's assurance that the changes "will make it easier for our customers to understand their fixed telephony plan".
From July 18 Optus has moved its charging from per second to per 30 seconds for national (STD) calls, what it calls community calls, and calls from home phones to mobiles. International calls moved from per second to per 60 seconds.
Optus has retained the same rate, as in 40 cents per 30 seconds for some calls, but instead of applying that rate at 1.3 cents per second it is rounding up all timed calls to the next 30-second increment to incur the full 30-second charge. This means that 29 in 30 timed calls will cost more, and in the case of international calls that is 59 in 60 calls.
What makes this especially lucrative for Optus is that a substantial and increasing proportion of calls are less than 30 seconds long, thanks to the phone companies' passion for flagfall-claiming voicemail and answering services. If you labour over a pencil and paper, as I have, you'll see that Optus has doubled the number of seconds that are charged in these calls of less than 30 seconds.
As well, there's an increased bonus in these machine-answered calls, and all others, because Optus has increased flagfall from 35 cents to 45 cents. Now a person hanging up on a machine-answered call will pay for 30 seconds instead of, say, three seconds. In such a call the cost increases from 39 cents to 85 cents!
In my column in The Herald today I make the point that young people especially tend not to consider the charging rate for calls when they enter contracts with what sound like generous allowances of so-called free calls each month. Pay $100 a month and get $200 worth of free calls! The $200 worth of calls might not be worth much at all in the way of calls, but that's something most people would not find out until they'd signed up.
In its letter telling customers of the new charging system Optus even assures them that "the included call value" on their plan remains unchanged! Unchanged even though calls cost substantially more and will exhaust the call allowance sooner!
Optus, by the way, is not the only phone company to move from per-second charging to 30-second and 60-second blocks - Telstra did much the same early last year.
Despite the carefully worded letter of disclosure, I see the change as increasing prices by stealth, as Optus taking its customers for suckers. So many of us are indeed suckers in the face of the phone industry's marketing that I believe transparency will be increasingly smothered by complexity so deliberate it amounts to obfuscation. Has that been your experience?
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