Easy access at the tip of your fingers, subscribe to our daily ePaper version of our New Era Newspaper.
Home / Customer friendly data charging philosophy from MTC
Customer friendly data charging philosophy from MTC
2014-12-15Staff Report 2 By Staff Reporter WINDHOEK - It is incredible how smart phones have changed our lives. Today we are either reading emails, busy on social networks, or sending or watching videos, which means that our smartphones are always in our hands at any time of the day. All this activity has drastically increased the demand for data and in order to support this new trend in lifestyles, and to ensure that customers get full value for their money, MTC has introduced a new way of billing for data across its postpaid select and all prepaid customers, as announced by MTC’s Chief Human Capital and Corporate Affairs Officer, Tim Ekandjo. So how will this new data charging work? To the prepaid customers, after you have used all your free data or megabytes included in any Aweh weekly subscription, a daily fee of N$2 is charged when the data session is initiated at the beginning of the day (00:00). The small fee allows customers access to 10 megabytes until midnight. When the customers reach their daily usage limit, the data session will be suspended until the next day cycle so that there will be no surprises. “We have also introduced a functionality where the customer will now receive a notification SMS when they reach 8 megabytes (meaning 80 percent of their daily 10 megabytes per day), simply notifying the customer that their daily data session is almost exhausted, and will recommend that the customer buy a new data bundle by calling *682#. “We will apply exactly the same principles to our postpaid select packages; when a customer reaches 80 percent of data on monthly subscription on his/her package, an SMS will notify the customer about the pending data depletion and that a daily fee will be charged once depleted,” says MTC. The daily fee will depend on the subscription; the higher the subscription, the more data the customer can use during the day, so see information on the MTC website pertaining to daily fees that apply to different packages. Also important to note is when postpaid customers reach their daily data usage limit, the data session will be suspended till the next day’s cycle unless the customer opts to buy a new data bundle. The same SMS notification will be sent to the postpaid customer as the prepaid. This new system is consistent with the data bundles that MTC introduced in the market some years back. And to make this even more exciting, Ekandjo explains that MTC has now doubled the megabytes of the data bundles, i.e. with the same price the customer will get double megabytes. The data bundles also generate an SMS that will always notify the customer when usage reaches 80 percent, which puts the customer in much better control of their usage. MTC believes that introducing these new ways to charge data usage, and notifying per SMS will significantly support the customer and avoid nasty surprises of data charges incurred by applications that the customer might not be aware of running on their devices. Ekandjo remarks: “In adapting to market demands, trends and patterns, we have noticed that more data is consumed by the average Namibian – hence our offer of doubling the data volumes on our data-bundles, introducing a standard daily fee for data and notifying our customers by SMS which is a clear demonstration of MTC’s commitment to its customers by offering improved data access at affordable and most competitive rates.” Ekandjo concluded that “MTC will always look for innovative ways to support growing customer needs, so be poised for very exciting times ahead as we provide world-class, future-proof technologies, communications solutions and best prices that are relevant to the Namibian market.” 2014-12-15Staff Report 2
