Bill Shock Prevention: Promises and Reality

I has a number of posts about mobile operators, regulators and industry organizations announcing their plans to implement bill shock prevention tools (see "24 Operator Groups (4B Subscribers) to Adopt Bill Shock Prevention Measures This Year (2012)" - here; "Latam MNOs to Implement Bill Shock Prevention by H1 2013" - here, "Australia - Bill Shock Prevention Self-Regulation is Coming" - here; "Bill Shock Prevention is Coming to the US Mobile Service" - here and "EU Helps Preventing Mobile Bill Shock" - here.

And the reality?

A survey conducted by MACH (see "MACH Launches a Cloud-based Bill Shock Prevention Solution" - here) shows that the ".. majority of mobile operators (62%) have not yet implemented any form of bill-shock prevention to protect their customers against unexpectedly high data roaming bills. Furthermore, only 24% of mobile operators worldwide have a solution that can monitor subscriber data usage habits in real-time, thus complying with the GSMA Data Roaming Transparency Initiative launched last year. Such solutions, that consider the subscribers’ data roaming experience first and foremost, boost uptake of data roaming services, leading to more revenue for operators and increased customer satisfaction".

Nevertheless, I also covered several deployments of bill shock prevention by Telefonica, Zain Jordan, Orange Africa, Belgacom and Telekom Austria.

See "Mobile Operators Slow To Protect Consumers From Bill-Shock, Says MACH" - here.