Imagine withdrawing one thousand Kwacha from the bank and keeping it in an envelope at home. A month later, a shop attendant refuses to accept your money for a transaction saying your banknotes are expired. How would you feel? I am sure you would rush to your bank for a colourful exchange of words with the branch manager.
That is exactly the same way I feel when I buy Internet data bundles and they expire before I have exhausted them. How about you? Are you happy to see your data bundles expire while the provider keeps your money without it losing value?
About 15 years ago in the early days of the Cellphone industry, this exact system was used by mobile phone providers. Whenever you bought talk time, it would expire after a designated number of days.
It used to be very infuriating to buy airtime and find it expired on the day you wanted to make that really important phone call. It was impractical to keep track of the expiry date, so sometimes you would be forced to make calls to people you don’t really want to hear from, just to avoid losing your airtime before the expiry date. There was a big public outcry over this and eventually, the practice was abolished, much to the relief of everyone who was privileged enough to own a cellphone.
Unfortunately for all of us, the Zambia Information & Communications Technology Authority (ZICTA) has been sleeping at the wheel concerning the matter of data bundles. All Internet providers sell data bundles with an expiry date condition.
Why is this retrogressive practice allowed? Why should we be forced to consume our Internet data bundles within a fixed number of days? Why should we be made to go into overdrive watching videos and downloading things a day before the bundle expires? Why should we lose Gigabytes and Gigabytes of data and money to Internet providers? Just like airtime credit, Internet Data bundles must never expire!
The main functions of money are distinguished as: a medium of exchange, a unit of account or store of value. That means that any item or verifiable received as a purchase must carry the same value of the quantity of currency used in the exchange. Therefore if cash is kept unused, deliberately or otherwise, for a month, it can not lose its value. Data bundles are money. We pay good money for Internet data and we deserve to consume it whenever, wherever and however we want. It was a fair exchange of value for value.
Whichever way you look at it, the whole practice is unacceptable and feels like theft because Internet service providers happily get our money upfront but oftentimes do not give us the full value of our cash. Any left over data from an expired Internet bundle has a monetary value. We should not allow the Internet service providers to reach into our pockets and get our money.
If the logic of expiring talk time was accepted by everyone, why doesn’t the same logic apply to data? We should be free to use the data as and when we want because it costs nothing for the Internet providers to remove the expiry dates. It costs them nothing even if someone uses their bundle over 6 months. Everything is controlled by automated software.
I call upon ZICTA and the rest of my fellow Zambians to stand up and join the campaign against this abuse by Internet service providers. We cannot accept the explanation that this is a global practice; why can’t Zambia take the lead for once and stop this?
It is #MyMoneyMyData
15 responses
Seemingly valid complaint, until you ask yourself : If I pay to watch a movie at the local cinema, and then I dont go at the designated day/time, is the cinema operator obliged to show the movie even after the movie schedule has changed ?
If you buy a loaf of bread from a supermarket, and dont eat it for a year, is the supermarket required to give you a fresh loaf ?
If you pay for your monthly satellite tv program/Netflix and don’t watch anything that month, should they still provide you with another month of viewing ?
I think whilst you may feel you have a valid argument, you may wish to delve into the reason that there seems to be a disconnect between wholesale and retail internet supply. Wholesale internet is purchased in Mbps/Gbps ( i.e a flowing tap ), whereas retail internet is sold to consumer in bundles ( i.e bottled discrete units ). When you can reconcile these two, you may come up with an equitable distribution of capacity.
Thanks for the feedback.
The main point that needs addressing is my comparison with airtime which also used to expire. If we apply your arguments to airtime, do you think they hold?
Secondly, the nature of a movie or TV is that video is shown at a specific point in time and that time can never be rewound or recovered. A loaf of bread also gets rotten due to the time element. But a data bundle by its very nature is similar to money and is such that it can be used at any time in one sitting or broken over time into several sittings.
This is why the cinema or TV comparison does not hold because you cannot stop a live transmission of the news to go to the toilet for example (You can only record it onto your decoder and pause that recording and watch it later and you are limited by the space on your device). This same logic applies to a satellite TV subscription because it is payment to view programs that are aired at specific points in time according to a schedule. Some of those programs are new documentaries being aired for the first time or new TV series. They are all bound by time.
A data bundle however is not bound to a particular point in time the way a TV program that is aired live is. It is denominated in bytes the same way money is denominated in Kwacha. The bytes are usable for anything at any time, just like money.
The only thing that makes sense to expire is an uncapped Internet connection based on a particular speed. eg if I pay for a 2MBs connection for one month, it has the same characteristics as a TV subscription. A data bundle is however a discrete unit and different from a subscription.
Your last point proves my point. Since the connection of the provider to the Internet is not based on fixed data but on a continuous “pipe” with uncapped data transfer, this can be redistributed.
One similar example I can give is a person receiving water from the council based on a fixed charge on their house. They then charge other people in the neighbourhood who come to them for water per container. It would be absurd to tell people to consume the water within 30 days or it expires. But if one neighbour is tapping into your supply via a pipe from your house to their house, then it makes sense to charge them a monthly fixed charge.
“You have Data 39344.55 MB Home Data Valid until 2017-03-11 00:00:00.JUST FOR YOU! Dial *777# to access your SPECIAL BUNDLES.” Today is 9th March 2017. I have two days to finish 39 Gb of data. I paid K999 for 100 Gb of MTN data on 10th February. I will lose 20 Gb+ of data because I won’t be able to finish it by the 11 March 2017. That is money lost. I have always held the view that data should not expire. If it has to, give us a three months validity period at least. I will lost my data and be expected to buy more data. That is so unfair. To the author of this article, let’s go beyond complaining in the media and petition ZICTA to force a change of this policy. Start an online petition against the expiry of data or at least let the ISPs extend the validity to three months.
How is this the same with the data that we buy? The main differences are that the movie that you purchase a ticket to watch is not a personal service. What I mean is that my consumption of the data that I purchased from my phone does not disadvantage the next data consumer like the movie example you just gave Therefore, by consuming my data, I do not affect other people who have an equal right as myself so your movie argument is not valid. The bread argument is also not valid because if I had a mechanism to store that bread for two months say in a vacuum so that it does not rot, I am at liberty to come back and eat it at my own discretion. The bakery cannot take it away from me and say the bread has expired. The challenge with satellite TV is that of measurement. How can DSTV confirm that you have actually not watched their channels for the month? This is not so with data. You can actually track data use.This is the main difference with data.Therefore, even this argument falls flat. The author is very much right and Im very willing to sign a petition to force ZICTAs hand.
Michael Chishal, would you mind if your article was used to start a petition to get ZICTA to do something about this i.e. prevent the TELCOs from causing data to expire?
Great article, please try to get us some answers.
Comrade, start the online petition. We will sign.
That is the way we should go. Ala pa ZED we are a bwafya bweka bweka. people are stealing from us and we watching. waiting for Jesus to come and speak for us. The problem is that even people who claim to have traveled far and wide can not compare and complain about this day light robbery by service providers
If you rent a house and decides not to live or sleep in it, do you expect your lease or rent to be perpetual… What the blogger is forgetting that the bandwidth capacity that ISPs use to provide internet services in Zambia is leased and rent needs to be paid. So how do you expect ISPs to meet their capacity needs if data do not expire? Even in Europe data has an expiring date, no wonder people are able to purchase access to the internet for 72 hours after which you need to get another access voucher….It is important to do some research on the matter
Whether that’s the way it is elsewhere or designed by the industry, it’s still day light robbery. The consumer world needs to stand up to this cartel by the industry.
I am in for the petition. It should indeed be My Money, My Data.
These internet providers are just thieves. They want to milk us of every last ngwee. In this bad economy, I support abolishing of the 30 day limits. Maybe 6 months is aceptable.
Mr Industry Expert, I already made the point in another comment that something that is by nature tied to time (eg TV subscription) makes sense to expire since you are paying for the unlimited consumption of a service within a specified time frame. However, a data bundle is not tied to time. Like money, it can be spent anytime, anyhow.
When you rent a house, your usage is unlimited. eg you cannot be told that you can only occupy rooms for half the day or that you can only use the kitchen but not the living room. That is why it is tied to a period of time.
But Let’s say you bought 3 days usage for a shared office. I don’t think it makes sense to tell you after a month that your 3 days are expired. You should be free to consume the 3 days today, or another day in the future (within reason of course, such as within a year).
The only thing that makes sense to expire is an uncapped internet connection based on speed but not a data bundle. The former does not limit how much data you use within a month for example but only limits how fast the connection is. A data bundle is however is based on Gigabytes of actual data transfered. I suspect that your example of Europe is a wrong one because most Internet connections in Europe are based on uncapped monthly usage and not a data bundle.
Moreover, as already explained earlier, ISPs get an uncapped connection from international providers. They do not get data bundles.
Marcus Malimba, I do not mind at all. Indeed that course of action is being explored. Feel free to do the needful.
Marcus Malimba, great points.