On average, the amount of money I spend every month on bandwidth and Internet connectivity equates to a small fortune. There just never seems to be enough, with World of Warcraft updates and the latest Linux server, or simply downloading the high-res pictures my family likes to send me via e-mail.
But when I saw the amount of money that MTN is asking one of our readers to pay in back-charges for data, I nearly choked on my cappuccino. R91 000 seems a ludicrous figure when you can get uncapped access from several companies from around less than R500 a month.
It was with the aim of checking MTN's charges that I set out to see whether it would be possible to spend that much money on connectivity for any given month - or at least download that much out of bundle in a month - and the results are astounding.
MTN's Web site says its customers connect at 384Kbps for 3G, which is the top download speed possible on the company's network at the moment.
Running a consistent download 24-hours a day, seven days a week for 30 days, it is possible to download roughly 124GB per month.
Keep in mind that this figure is consistent download through 30 days at the maximum possible speeds available.
Number-crunching
There are many people I know on 4Mbps ADSL who reach downloads of 100GB in a month - what with the advent of high-definition video and other wonderful bandwidth-munchers, but these guys are using a far faster service.
But on average, with that theoretical figure of 124GB, you could download around 13 of those fancy high-definition movies (at 9GB each - which I believe is the given size right now), or about 31 regular DVD quality movies (at about 4GB each).
It is just not physically feasible to download that much in a month on an MTN data package.
Candice Jones, telecoms editor, ITWeb
It's not even worth considering the hundreds of thousands of regular length songs you could download with that capacity.
Assuming this MTN customer decided that a movie a day for a month was exactly the kind of relaxation he needed to face the world, and assuming he had stayed within his cap limits by buying new top-up bundles, there is still no way he could have reached the massive R91 000.
That's a lot of movies
At MTN's in-bundle rate of 20c/Mb, the customer would have owed the company just under a quarter of that, paying R25 000. Still cheaper to order DVDs online.
But let's face it, who actually ever stays in-bundle, unless you have Axxess's fabulous auto top-up option?
The next logical calculation would then be to look at the out of bundle rates, which are significantly higher at R1.20. If you manage to download 124Gb of data off MTN's network out of bundle, expect to fork out R147 923.
Even for high-def videos, that is a pretty packet.
So it certainly is possible to rack up a bill of R91 000 and it becomes far more plausible if you work in someone going excessively over their allotted data bundles.
Not going to happen
However, this idealistic download is not quite what the average person gets, especially not off a highly-contested 3G network. It is just not physically feasible to download that much in a month on an MTN data package.
So how is it possible that MTN's customer managed to get into such hot water? There is a very real possibility that the customer's bill was calculated over several months, although it seems that most of the customers affected by MTN's billing saw the trouble over the October-November period.
The other very real possibility is that MTN is simply wrong and this poor guy does not owe the operator a king's ransom. The company has hardly been secretive about its billing trouble, and has since June last year been working on fixing these system issues.
The company may well have got it wrong, and it has promised to take on each customer's case to see what can be done to help. However, the company's customer care centre is already taking strain. Rumour has it that at least one care centre operator is ready to quit before any more of the over-charged customers call in.
MTN will need to step up now and take responsibility for the trouble, specifically since locals are no longer taking bad service sitting down.
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