Do you have any idea what you pay for a phone call? I know I don’t. I know that I have R135 of airtime to spend per month on whatever I choose whether it be phoning mistresses or browsing youporn. What each of these activities actually costs is a mystery to me. To the best of my knowledge I pay R2 per MB when I’m using wireless internet but when I tried to find a price on the vodacom website I was completely stumped.
I have no idea what this costs me
The fact of the matter is the most people select their contract without really considering the cost involved. If your friends all have blackberries you get a blackberry contract, if you’re an Apple sheepdrone you’ll take the assraping required to get an iPhone, if you work for a large company you’ll use whatever contract your company gives you and if, like me, you just want a new phone every 2 years you’ll get a topup style contract. You may also base you decision on how many free SMS’s you get.
For people who base their technology purchases on how pretty something looks.
If you’ve ever tried to work out what your contract will cost you you’ll find it fairly difficult. There really is no easy way to compare tariffs across operators. They all use different pricing systems and when you get down to it, the information is fucking impossible to find anyway.
Which makes me angry
In order to rectify this situation buyersbibles.co.za has put together a little guide to summarise the costs of calls across the various pricing plans on the various networks. They call it the Airtime Bible and it’s available as a PDF download. The primary statistic used to pull everything together is that the average length of a cell call in SA is allegedly 98 seconds long. They’ve rounded up to 100 seconds for the sake of decent numbers but it’s close enough. Every call plan on the four South African mobile networks has it’s details tabulated and then the cost of a 100 second call is calculated.
The calculated cost does not include the extra credit card charges you're paying for your telephonic horoscope
The cost of data transfers is not included but I have been told that they are working on it. Till they have that sorted I’m still working on the assumption that a 3 minute, 30MB youporn video will cost me R60, so when I get down to brass tacks I may as well go adult world an just buy a DVD.
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