Telstra Prevents Bill Shock by Cutting Off Subscribers

   

"TELSTRA'S 1.6 million iPhone and BlackBerry customers will have their internet access switched off if they overspend, because the telco has had enough of customers refusing to pay" so reported by couriermai.com.au.

See "Telstra to cut off mobile phone users who go over their internet limits" - here

"It stops the charge but it also stops the service," Telstra's chief financial officer John Stanhope said yesterday .. While Telstra "didn't want to intrude" into users' lives, it had been forced to act because it was losing tens of millions of dollars when customers failed to cough up .. Telstra was partly to blame because it wasn't doing a good enough job of explaining plans and costs to its new smartphone customers .. app cap would benefit many customers by protecting them from big bills."

During Telstra's 2010 full year results conference, CEO David Thodey said (transcript - here):

"One area of disappointment in our cost base has been our bad debts expense. Bad debts increased 44 percent to $364 million. Admittedly, much of the increase was self inflicted with what we call bad volumes. Bad volumes include misalignment between a customer’s choice of plan and the plan they are initially billed for. The difficult economic conditions this year also contributed to larger write offs. So we had two elements, confusion by customers of plans and charges on their bills, et cetera, but we also did experience some bad debts due to the economic conditions. Pleasingly, we now have a detailed remediation plan in place to make sure we have lower bad debts moving forward. "

See other ways to cope with Bill Shock:

• FCC Follows Europe With Bill Shock Prevention - Vendor Offering Review - here
• EU Helps Preventing Mobile Bill Shock - here