Q—I recently got a mobile phone and see charges for “incoming” on my bills. I don’t remember being charged for receiving calls on my landline phone. How are calls from landline phones to mobile phones charged?
A—The short answer is that usually whoever calls pays. However, in most of the United States, calling a mobile phone is a little more complicated than that. All calls from landline phones, whether by a residential or commercial customer, to any mobile phone is billed to the landline subscriber for the duration of the call. The actual charges are based on the class of call used by the landline subscriber to complete the call. Call classifications include local, direct dial (or 1+), operator-assisted, calling card, etc.
If the call is to a mobile phone served by a carrier in the same market, it may be considered local, and the charge to the caller could be included in the monthly access charge. If the mobile phone is in another market, it may be considered a long-distance call, and your long-distance company will charge you for that call. Most times, using operator assistance will incur additional charges or surcharges for that service.
Now, to explain those “incoming” charges on your bill. In most places in the United States, mobile customers pay for incoming calls. (As with the connect time issue above, any use of airtime is considered billable time.) Some operators (in a lively competitive spirit) do not charge for the first minute of incoming calls. In most other parts of the world, mobile subscribers do not pay for incoming calls. This general rule is referred to as “Calling Party Pays.” There is a wireless industry initiative before the FCC to change U.S. policy so that charges for incoming calls will be reduced or eliminated.
According to industry sources, wireless operators want to give their subscribers the option of not paying for all incoming calls. As the operators are allowed to recover their costs, the airtime charges will be shifted to the calling party. It may be some time before we see decision concerning Calling Party Pays, as there is considerable disagreement between various interests in the telecommunications industry. Some of the issues being studied include how callers will be informed that they may incur an additional charge if they complete the call, and how calling landline subscribers will be billed for the airtime (there are no existing message exchange procedures between wireless and landline at this time). The government quite rightly also wants to insure that persons with disabilities are not impacted by any Calling Party Pays arrangements. As with so many other issues in a fast changing industry, stay tuned!
Q—I receive detailed bills from my mobile carrier for airtime and from my long-distance carrier for long-distance calls. I notice that often the start time of the call is different, sometimes by as much as 2 or 3 minutes. Sometimes the duration is different as well. Can you explain this?
A—The basic reason is that each switch that records time of calls uses its own internal clock and, unfortunately, they are not all synchronized to the same exact time. Every effort is made to be exact as possible, but on those rare occasions when switch software is reloaded, the clock may not be accurately set to Greenwich Mean Time (plus the offsetting hours from Greenwich for the time zone where the switch is located).
The second reason is another of those dirty little secrets of telecommunications. Most U.S. wireless companies start the call from the time a subscriber depresses the “send” button to initiate a call. The rationale is that the (private) wireless network is being used, and a service of value is being received. Calls recorded by your long-distance provider, on the other hand, are subject to landline policies whereby a call begins when the called party answers. (This is also true for local landline services.) The policy is probably a holdover from bygone days when actual human operators connected two phones and noted the time when the called party answered. In the modern networks of today, only signaling circuits are in use until the called number answers—so there was no major justification for departing from the long-established expectations of customers.
Q—How does a billing system know that a call was made while roaming on a partner’s network, and why does roaming cost more in some places than in others?
A—First let’s answer how they are recognized. All calls, whether by home customers or visiting “roaming customers,” are recorded by the switch that provided service for the calls. When the call records get to the serving carrier’s billing system, roamer records are separated out and rated based on the rates established between the home and serving carrier.
The roamer records are created in a special format known as CIBER, which stands for Cellular Industry Billing Exchange Record. The CIBER format was established by the wireless industry in North America back in the mid-1980s to allow carriers to exchange roaming records in a common layout. If a home billing system that receives roamer calls reformats them into another internal layout, they are flagged to identify them as having originated elsewhere. Unless a subscriber is billed using one of the ever more popular “one-rate” plans, the roamer calls are typically grouped by serving carrier to display the time and charges for each call on the next invoice.
Many of the one-rate plans eliminate separate roamer rates and include roamer minutes in the basic monthly allowance of minutes. Some carriers do not include all roamer minutes in these plans, so subscribers may continue to see some roaming minutes even with a one-rate plan.
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