John Linton
As part of the investigation process of putting in place an Exetel calling card service/VoIP without VoIP equipment service I have been looking at the range of amazingly low cost calling card and VoIP options available to Australian users. I would be the first to admit that my knowledge of calling card service delivery costs and VoIP costs achieved by other VoIP providers is very basic. So I did what any sensible person would do - I started talking with people who had far more knowledge than I did and who were willing to share their knowledge.
To say that I was surprised by many of the statements I heard would be an understatement.
I had lunch late last week with a business acquaintance who has a good knowledge, based on long experience in the calling card business, of how to buy voice minutes and how to package calling card offerings to make them both attractive to the purchaser (versus the plethora of other cards on the market) and priced in ways that enabled a profit, albeit very small, to be made.
His advice and knowledge was comprehensive and freely given and his analysis of the top 5 companies in the calling card business was precise and pointed.
I was extremely grateful for his detailed picking apart of the various cards I had purchased to get a better understanding of how they actually worked and what sort of quality they provided.
I was astonished at, what I perceived to be, the criminal/fraudulent ways that some of the cards actually operated to deliver their unbelievably low rates.
I understood that most companies that provide calling cards build in to their cost structures the benefits of things like:
1) Expiry dates occurring before all minutes are used
2) Tourists seldom using up a card they buy before leaving the country
3) A percentage of cards getting damaged/lost before they are used up
All reasonable assumptions and backed by experience of many years in determining those percentages.
What I, in my naivety, had no idea about was that several of the low cost cards I had purchased to test achieved their unbelievably low 'face value' call charges because:
1) The 'billing system' used by the provider used a "loading" of between 50% and 300% on the minute counter (ie. 1 actual minute could be counted as three minutes)
2) The face value of the card might say $20.00 but the actual value of calls programmed in to the 'billing system' might be as low as $15.00
3) The card didn't spell out a connection charge but contained a statement in almost unreadable print that "some destinations may incur a connection charge" which actually meant that ALL destinations incurred a connection charge and that connection charge could be as high as 65 cents per call - on one card it was $1.00.
There were several other even more scurrilous comments made but I'm not going to write them here.
I had trouble believing that any company that operated in Australia could get away with such practices so I tested a couple of the statements by dialling the 'speaking clock' in three different countries which were at very low rates on three different $10.00 cards.
Sure enough - my $10.00 cards that should have given me between 200 and 300 minutes behaved like this:
1) All three cards didn't connect for more than the time it took to incur the connection fee the first time I used each one.
2) I got 67 minutes instead of 280 minutes on the first card, 108 minutes instead of 200 minutes on the second card and 115 minutes instead of 240 minutes on the third card before the call dropped out and when I re-dialled I got a 'credit is used up' message.
I subsequently tested the remaining cards for call quality and found:
1) 30% of the cards I tested failed to connect for at least three trys before getting through to the number
2) The call quality was at best difficult and at worst required a re-dial on all cards
3) Over a period of two hours in the late afternoon it took up to 8 re-dials to actually get a line to call out on (each time involving a local call charge to me)
In marked contrast to these results were the results achieved on calling cards that had very low rates but, from what I knew of carrier call charges, would have made a profit on each destination. Each of these cards from the three biggest providers to the Australian market had near perfect, or perfect, quality and my 'speaking clock' test showed they all had the advertised minutes.
However all but two of them did have a call connection fee that I eventually found by calling the service desks.
An interesting exercise and, if my experience was a true indication of what the really amazingly cheap calling cards provide, I fail to understand how some regulatory authority or TV 'shame and blame' outfit hasn't done something to bring this to more people's attention.
My test buyer went back to three of the convenience stores to complain that he'd been ripped off and was told "none of my business/never heard that before/nothing I can do" - as was inevitably going to be the case. When then asked for a recommendation for a better card, each time one of the more expensively priced supplier's card was offered.
I must get out more.