Okay. Deep breaths.
A bit over a week ago, I moved my Telstra personal mobile account, which has been connected for some years, to a new $80/month business account.
This was an adventure in itself, but we got there in the end.
The monthly data allowance for the $80 plan is 1.5 GB. I have an extra “bonus” 1 GB of data for the first 12 months, so my actual allowance until October 2013 is 2.5 GB /month, at which time it reverts to 1.5 GB /month.
Personally, my monthly data usage is usually 300 or 400 MB, maybe 500 MB. I have never used much more than this.
After a few days, I checked the data use on my new plan. Here’s what the tool said on my mobile phone (right).
Looking at the summary at the top, it says I have used 2.53 GB of data. The detailed graph at the bottom, however, says I have used about 32 MB.
On Saturday 20/10 I asked the Telstra Twitterati if there was an issue with “MyAccount” which might be showing erroneous data usage. The customer service tweep “Greg II” said yes, there “may possibly be an impact”. He provided me with a helpful link to a “Permission Denied” webpage, and then a 404 page, and then a customer survey. After another few hours I got the correct link which explained that upgrades were taking place which might affect data usage reporting.
On Tuesday 23/10 I started a text chat with Telstra because the issue had not been resolved. I spoke to Novy, and the conversation went like this:
Honestly!? Might?! I asked Novy to find out, and remained adamant that I would not be paying any excess data charges, particularly in light of the fact that Telstra’s reporting system was showing me two conflicting data usage values.
Novy called me In Real Life and transferred me to a technical support team member. I spoke to Mack. He was very helpful, and appeared to understand the problem from the outset. Mack agreed there was a massive discrepancy which he couldn’t explain. He put me on hold so he could ask the boffins further up the food chain.
After about 30 minutes, Mack explained there was a technical fault and he had raised an “internal IT docket” to have it fixed. He said I would probably be billed the excess data charge, but that he would ensure my account received a credit note / adjustment in the same amount so I wasn’t penalised. Mack also gave me his employee number and assured me the “back office team will investigate and fix this problem”.
Seriously, Telstra, why is this so hard? Am I the only person on NextG that’s ever moved a personal mobile service to a business account? You’d think an administrative change like this would be sufficiently streamlined to avoid these kinds of headaches. I’m sticking with Telstra because they have a technically superior network, but the hassles of getting an account working are depressingly (and in my opinion, unnecessarily) time consuming.
I’m sure I could have just paid the extra $9 on the next account, but that’s not the point, as you’ve probably already guessed.
Fingers crossed for now. Don’t let me down, Mack.
More soon.
Telstra has a similar policy with Bigpond Cable. I updated to a higher plan, right at the end of a billing cycle. Didn’t realise that my substantial remaining data allowance would cancelled, and the new plan data pro-rata’d for the remainder of the bill cycle. It just took a modest amount of activity to put the account into throttled mode. After 2 calls and much long argument, Telstra agreed to re-instate my unused data from the old plan. Madness.