I was looking to subscribe to a new line and had a month or so to shop around for the best deal, so I decided to make a thorough search with some time that I had. It should take no more than a day.
The more I search, the more confused I was. Anyways, I spent more time on this than I intended to and came up with this:
1. That the telcos charge a one-time Registration Fee and a SIM Card charge for new subscribers. Do you know if you bitch about it, this is readily waived? All I said was if you’re going to charge me this, I’m sticking to my current provider and it was waived. Just like that.
2. That local talktime are all pegged at $16.05 per min. Some competition, huh?
2. That free incoming calls are treated as a promotion item and can be possibly reversed in the future. It will not be without protests but the 3 telcos behave like a monopoly, although they like to be portrayed otherwise.
3. That SMSes sent overseas are charged at as much as 3x a local SMS.
4. That ‘Free’ Incoming Calls means Incoming calls are free. Right? Wrong. Take a look at the following C&P
4.1 SingTel Mobile Price Plans: A one-time registration fee of $10.70 and SIM Card charge of $32.10 apply to new subscribers of all mobile price plans. Local airtime is charged based on an initial block of 1 minute and subsequent blocks of 6 seconds each. For free incoming call plans, excess local airtime is charged at 16.05¢/minute. (link)
If it’s free all day, where does the excess local airtime which is charged at 16.05¢/min, comes from?
4.2 M1’s Free Incoming <is subject to M1’s Fair Use policy. If, in its reasonable opinion, M1 deems that a customer’s usage is excessive, M1 may ask the customer to moderate the customer’s usage. If the customer fails to do so, M1 reserves the right to charge the customer for the excessive element of the customer’s usage at M1 s standard rate and/or transfer the customer s bill plan to the equivalent bill plan without this offer> (link)
Don’t talk too much or we’ll take this away.
4.3 I seem to have read that incoming calls originating not from Singapore are not free and local talktime of 16.05¢/min applies. Can any kind soul verify this?
5. That even with Free IDD to selected destinations, you’re still paying local airtime charge of $0.16/min. And look between the lines, some ‘free’ IDD requires you to pay a fee of $5/month
6. That you are charged premium rates for calls made to your SG mobile when you are overseas, even a wrong number. How much more can these be, you ask …
Well, for comparison sake, here are their rates, both premium & non-premium, to China
SingTel – IDD001 - $1.39/min; V019 - $0.13/min <link>
M1 - IDD 002 - $1.39/min peak & $1.35/min off peak; - IDD 021 - $0.60/min peak & $0.55/min off peak <link>
Starhub - IDD 008 - $1.32/min; IDD 018 - $0.18/min <link>
So there you are, when someone calls you on your mobile while you are overseas, it costs you 10x what you pay when you call the same country using non-premium IDD. And do they bother to tell you that? And do they let you have a choice?
Look, look between the lines, scrutinize the small print.
7. That many ‘free’ IDD calls are valid only to fixed lines, not mobile phones. To be fair, this is not a making of the local telcos, we can only point our fingers at all the greedy telcos in general.
8. That you probably spend as much as 10% of your mobile bill on Voice Mails. I called my previous telco to terminate the Voice Mail feature 3 times. 3 times it was mysteriously put back on.
Some kind soul taught me to divert all my calls (all those if busy, no reply or out of reach) to a ‘0’. This way, the caller won’t be prompted to leave a message and the telco can’t reinstall it on my phone.
9. That you are paying for that ‘free’ phone, with interest. If you want to know how much the phone is, just terminate the contract prematurely. Buy that goddamn phone with cash, no interest and no penalty, and it’s probably obsolete a week later anyway.
10. That deciphering data plans prices is almost tantamount to solving the Da Vinci Codes. Take the basic data plans from the 3 for example –
M1’s Sunsurf 5 gives you 2MB for $5.00/mth. Any excess beyond this is charged at $0.0107 per KB and capped at 10GB. So if you opted for this plan and downloaded 100MB of stuff, you’ll be charged for 98MB (100MB-2MB) which at $0.0107 per KB is $1048.60. As bro Nineteen kindly pointed out, M1 is quite ‘nice’.. will cap this at $299.00. <link>
SingTel’s Broadband Lite is the cheapest at $3.00 for 2MB, excess is charged at $0.00095 per KB to a max of $88.00, which is equivalent of slightly over 90MB. <link>
Starhub’s MaxMobile Value costs $5.00 and tells you this is worth $30 of downloaded data. At $0.032/KB, we work this out to be close to 1 MB. They, however, charge you a max of $34.00 for any data download in excess of this. <link>
***Bro Nineteen has kindly pointed out some conversion errors I made (see post 7), so I did some recalculation and rectify it here in the original post. Just so you know, the rates shown here slightly differs from the telcos' sites because they are net of GST. Therefore if it was $5.35, it's $5.00 here. Thx again, 19***
Am I paranoid or is there something they don’t want me to know. Like their prices compared on an even footing.
This is as far as my patience stretches so I’ll stop here. I’m sure there’s lot more to be exposed. Maybe exposed is too severe a word, this info is published on their websites, tucked between lines, in small print, in obscure terms, and by different measures and standards.
And oh, I can’t seem to locate this gem again – it says something like ‘8 cts per minute all days except Mondays to Fridays, 16cts per min other days’ or something to the effect.
Have a good day.
The more I search, the more confused I was. Anyways, I spent more time on this than I intended to and came up with this:
1. That the telcos charge a one-time Registration Fee and a SIM Card charge for new subscribers. Do you know if you bitch about it, this is readily waived? All I said was if you’re going to charge me this, I’m sticking to my current provider and it was waived. Just like that.
2. That local talktime are all pegged at $16.05 per min. Some competition, huh?
2. That free incoming calls are treated as a promotion item and can be possibly reversed in the future. It will not be without protests but the 3 telcos behave like a monopoly, although they like to be portrayed otherwise.
3. That SMSes sent overseas are charged at as much as 3x a local SMS.
4. That ‘Free’ Incoming Calls means Incoming calls are free. Right? Wrong. Take a look at the following C&P
4.1 SingTel Mobile Price Plans: A one-time registration fee of $10.70 and SIM Card charge of $32.10 apply to new subscribers of all mobile price plans. Local airtime is charged based on an initial block of 1 minute and subsequent blocks of 6 seconds each. For free incoming call plans, excess local airtime is charged at 16.05¢/minute. (link)
If it’s free all day, where does the excess local airtime which is charged at 16.05¢/min, comes from?
4.2 M1’s Free Incoming <is subject to M1’s Fair Use policy. If, in its reasonable opinion, M1 deems that a customer’s usage is excessive, M1 may ask the customer to moderate the customer’s usage. If the customer fails to do so, M1 reserves the right to charge the customer for the excessive element of the customer’s usage at M1 s standard rate and/or transfer the customer s bill plan to the equivalent bill plan without this offer> (link)
Don’t talk too much or we’ll take this away.
4.3 I seem to have read that incoming calls originating not from Singapore are not free and local talktime of 16.05¢/min applies. Can any kind soul verify this?
5. That even with Free IDD to selected destinations, you’re still paying local airtime charge of $0.16/min. And look between the lines, some ‘free’ IDD requires you to pay a fee of $5/month
6. That you are charged premium rates for calls made to your SG mobile when you are overseas, even a wrong number. How much more can these be, you ask …
Well, for comparison sake, here are their rates, both premium & non-premium, to China
SingTel – IDD001 - $1.39/min; V019 - $0.13/min <link>
M1 - IDD 002 - $1.39/min peak & $1.35/min off peak; - IDD 021 - $0.60/min peak & $0.55/min off peak <link>
Starhub - IDD 008 - $1.32/min; IDD 018 - $0.18/min <link>
So there you are, when someone calls you on your mobile while you are overseas, it costs you 10x what you pay when you call the same country using non-premium IDD. And do they bother to tell you that? And do they let you have a choice?
Look, look between the lines, scrutinize the small print.
7. That many ‘free’ IDD calls are valid only to fixed lines, not mobile phones. To be fair, this is not a making of the local telcos, we can only point our fingers at all the greedy telcos in general.
8. That you probably spend as much as 10% of your mobile bill on Voice Mails. I called my previous telco to terminate the Voice Mail feature 3 times. 3 times it was mysteriously put back on.
Some kind soul taught me to divert all my calls (all those if busy, no reply or out of reach) to a ‘0’. This way, the caller won’t be prompted to leave a message and the telco can’t reinstall it on my phone.
9. That you are paying for that ‘free’ phone, with interest. If you want to know how much the phone is, just terminate the contract prematurely. Buy that goddamn phone with cash, no interest and no penalty, and it’s probably obsolete a week later anyway.
10. That deciphering data plans prices is almost tantamount to solving the Da Vinci Codes. Take the basic data plans from the 3 for example –
M1’s Sunsurf 5 gives you 2MB for $5.00/mth. Any excess beyond this is charged at $0.0107 per KB and capped at 10GB. So if you opted for this plan and downloaded 100MB of stuff, you’ll be charged for 98MB (100MB-2MB) which at $0.0107 per KB is $1048.60. As bro Nineteen kindly pointed out, M1 is quite ‘nice’.. will cap this at $299.00. <link>
SingTel’s Broadband Lite is the cheapest at $3.00 for 2MB, excess is charged at $0.00095 per KB to a max of $88.00, which is equivalent of slightly over 90MB. <link>
Starhub’s MaxMobile Value costs $5.00 and tells you this is worth $30 of downloaded data. At $0.032/KB, we work this out to be close to 1 MB. They, however, charge you a max of $34.00 for any data download in excess of this. <link>
***Bro Nineteen has kindly pointed out some conversion errors I made (see post 7), so I did some recalculation and rectify it here in the original post. Just so you know, the rates shown here slightly differs from the telcos' sites because they are net of GST. Therefore if it was $5.35, it's $5.00 here. Thx again, 19***
Am I paranoid or is there something they don’t want me to know. Like their prices compared on an even footing.
This is as far as my patience stretches so I’ll stop here. I’m sure there’s lot more to be exposed. Maybe exposed is too severe a word, this info is published on their websites, tucked between lines, in small print, in obscure terms, and by different measures and standards.
And oh, I can’t seem to locate this gem again – it says something like ‘8 cts per minute all days except Mondays to Fridays, 16cts per min other days’ or something to the effect.
Have a good day.
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