Some news from Italy...
 

In these last weeks there has been a big debate about the "costi di ricarica" which means the recharge fees, in English, something which happened almost only in my country. Till last week it was "normal", for us, to pay 25€ and get 20€ of recharge only. Just Wind and 3 had some top-ups (high value) without these recharge fees.

Since the 6th of March all Italian operators don't have the recharge fees anymore! So if you refill with 10€ you get 10€, 25€/25€ and so on. There are no bonuses either.

That should be a very good piece of news if not for what happened next... Vodafone and Wind decided to create new prepaid plans which are all more expensive than before. Vodafone highered the setup fees at skyrocketing levels (19 cent!) while Wind highered the per minute rate and SMS cost of Senza Scatto and Wind10 (become Wind12). TIM and 3 are by now the 2 most convenient operators in Italy, which is rather strange, expecially for TIM, the former monopolist...

Let's see what will happen in the next future... in the meanwhile some members of the Government and communication authorities said that they are going to forbid also the use of the set-up fee! So big news ahead, and probably other tariff increments too...

Hmm, to be honest - did they really raise the rates so much, or even at all? Think about real costs. When you had to pay 25€ for 20€ top-up and use it at the nominal rate 0.10€/min, the real cost was 0.125€/min. If you have to pay 12 cents/min both real and nominal rate now, is it really worse?

However, the surcharge system was IMHO unfair, because it made the pricing rules obscure. I wonder why it wasn't forbidden earlier.

All this shows that telecom regulators and consumer rights institutions should be aware and really care about possible tariff tricks. It isn't per minute rate only that matters but much more stuff like setup fees, debiting, top-up surcharges, maintainance fees, rules of credit expiration (prepaid)/passing unused minutes/SMS/data to next month(s) (postpaid) etc.

Well, they raised the Wind10 by 20%, the SenzaScatto of more than 25% and the SMS rate of 50%... Plus also the various offers like Noi2, NoiWind, NoiItaly has been changed with higher cost and/or less minutes included...

For who was using refills of 50€ or more, always without surcharge, it's something very bad.... for people refilling with 10€ almost nothing changes...

Of course who has old tariffs can keep everything like before, without the surcharge.

I read about this on Monday 5th March, which is I think the day that this change happened. I had just bought a UK O2 voucher.
http://155.libero.it/pls/portal30/w1...ributiRicarica

I concluded that the change did not apply to international top-ups, and this turned out to be true: I had €5 deducted.

The international recharge page still shows the deduction:
http://155.libero.it/pls/portal30/w1....item?id=12406

Whether this is deliberate or accidental on Wind's part who can guess?

Dave

On Monday Wind still decided not to obey the law and kept on using those recharges, but then they were obliged to give all the credit to their customers from wednesday (i.e. yesterday). I don't know honestly if that applies to international top-up as well...

My previous post should have been smiley-decorated :). I perfectly realise that
"high top-up" users are "punished" what seems to be rather stupid policy :(

Exactly, it's quite a nonsense, but in Italy we are used to see that "smart users" are the ones which are regularly "punished"... strange country, isns' it?

I noticed the lack of recharge fee when I topped up a vodafone sim last week. I haven't topped up my wind card for a month, but need to, so I'll watch for it.

There's no problem in topping-up now, also with Wind. But there are other bad news... it seems that from the 1st of may all Wind10 customers will be moved to the new Wind12, which is of course much more expensive...

I don't get the point of connection charges, especially since they seem to have been raised by all providers. Raising the cost of any call, no matter of what duration, is a sure way to discourage people from placing calls, especially shorter or unimportant calls, and I can only imagine the rationale is that users don't pay attention to this (or that the provider makes a profit even on wrong numbers, not leaving a message, etc.) Vodafone, for example, offers 1-cent calls to a favorite number -- but a 19-cent connection charge.