Why do data bundles expire? Parliament grills network operators
Mobile data bundles expire in South Africa as a mechanism for network operators to manage the limited wireless capacity available to cellular networks.
Photo: Pexels/cottonbro studio
CapeTalk's Pippa Hudson, standing in for John Maytham, speaks to MyBroadband Editor Jan Vermeulen.
Listen below:
Do your data bundles sometimes expire before they run out? Parliament grilled major network operators (MNOs) about this and many other telecommunications issues on Friday, 13 June.
South Africa's Portfolio Committee on Communications and Digital Technologies summoned Vodacom, MTN, Cell C, Telkom, and Rain to explain this business model where data and airtime expire, and where they raise prices based on expiry dates.
Mobile data bundles expire in South Africa as a mechanism for network operators to manage the limited wireless capacity available to cellular networks, which was explained by several of the operators' CEOs present.
MNO bosses also agreed that not having expiry dates would significantly increase the price.
Vermeulen explains how the data/airtime expiration model works...
"There are various forms of expiry dates available... from a one-day bundle or 24-hour bundle to all the way up to six or 12-month bundles, and the bundles that last longer cost more."
- Jan Vermeulen, Editor - MyBroadband
"The one aspect they were not willing to discuss is a concept called 'breakage', and then there's the issue of the 'physical dimensioning' of their network... it just means planning the capacity on your network. So, if all your data is sold on 'use it whenever you please', it makes planning the capacity on the network exceedingly difficult. Breakage... is the amount of data you haven't used but paid for, and they make money on that."
- Jan Vermeulen, Editor - MyBroadband
"A data stream, think of it as a flow of water running through a pipe. Now, the thickness of that pipe tells you how fast the water can flow, and it's a very similar thing for data, and we measure it in megabytes per second. But data cannot be sold like that, otherwise it becomes really expensive, so they sell it in buckets... the data buckets themselves represent time... that's why you have expiry dates, why you have time associated with buckets of data - to move it from the flow of data into buckets you can sell. So, to sell a dedicated stream of data would be extremely expensive, so that's why they've created this bucket system to make it affordable..."
- Jan Vermeulen, Editor - MyBroadband
Scroll up to the audio player to listen to the full conversation.