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Glossary
The following glossary will be helpful for our
customers to understand our quality control system and hidden
charges in prepaid phone cards.
Prepaid phone card related
charges:
Terms used in our quality control
system:
Prepaid phone card related
charges:
- Connection Fee:
Also called first-minute surcharge. It's charged when a telephone
call is connected. It varies between 25 cents to as high as
$3. The easiest way to evaluate whether a cheaper phone card
with connection fee is worthwhile or not is to estimate the
average time for your phone calls. If you make 10 mins calls,
a card for 5 cents/min with $0.50 connection fee is actually
more expensive than a card for 9 cents/min with no connection
fee. It's better to use a phone card without connection fee
if you are not sure the person you are calling is there, and
the phone call may trigger an answer machine. Phone cards with
high connection fee is good for the case when you know your
party is there and you intend to talk for a long time.
- Tax: Believe it or
not, some prepaid phone cards charge a monthly tax or one-time
tax, and it can be as high as $1.50. Try to avoid it by checking
the information for your phone card carefully.
- Maintenance
Fee : Some phone cards will start to charge a maintenance
fee either when the first phone call is connected or after the
first phone call is finished. It could be as high as $1.50,
so check it out, too. The maintenance fee can be charged every
month, every two weeks, or every week. Maintenance fee is also
called sweet fee by certain phone card companies.
- Minutes Rounding:
This is the basic unit to record the length of your phone calls.
Industry standard is one minute rounding, as in the case of
your residential telephone services. Prepaid phone cards can
be rounded to one, two, or even three minutes. If it rounded
to 3 minutes, your 30 seconds phone call will be considered
as 3-mins phone call and your 4 mins phone call will be considered
as 6 mins phone call. Statistically, on average, for 2 mins
rounding, you will be charged for one more minutes for each
phone call, and for 3 mins rounding, you will be charged for
one and half more minutes for each phone call. So try to avoid
using phone cards with more than one minutes rounding.
- Pay-Phone
Surcharge: Prepaid phone cards provide the most convenience
when you want to make cheap phone calls anywhere, but there
is usually a surcharge between $0.30 up to $0.75 associated
when you use a public pay-phone. Payment for the use of a public
pay-phone is required by FCC. However, from the variation of
this surcharge, it's obvious that some phone card companies
use it as a way to profit.
- Communication
Fee: Some phone cards that look pretty cheap can turn out
to be not cheap at all. Certain phone cards are advertised with
an attractive total minutes in the card. But that number was
calculated based on a single call per card. Certain phone cards
charge a communication fee up to 25% of the phone call's cost.
This makes the rates to be 25% more expensive in reality. The
advertised total minutes looks more attractive because this
fee is usually applied after the call is finished.
- Long Talking
Fee: Certain phone cards charge this fee that's rarely known
to lots of customers. If the customer talked for more than 20
mins, 40 cents will be charged for every 20 minutes talking
time. This equals to 2 cents more per minute.
- Hang-up Fee:
When the remaining balance of a phone card gets to less than
the amount required for a one-minute phone call, this fee may
apply to reduce the balance to zero. Then the phone card will
be purged from the system soon.
Terms used in our quality control
system:
Billing Accuracy
- Five: No extra charge beside all charges listed
- Four: actual rate is higher than advertised
by less than 10%
- Three: actual rate is higher than advertised
by 10-25%
- Two: actual rate is higher than advertised
by 25-50%
- One: actual rate is higher than advertised
by more than 50%
Ease of Connection
- Five: No Busy Signal
- Four: Occasionally busy, but can get connected
within a few tries
- Three: I tend to use the card during certain
time. Busy but can get connected with several tries
- Two: during certain time; Have to try many
times to get connected
- One: I try to use the card throughout the day.
Seems always busy
Voice Quality
- Five: Crystal clear;
- Four: clear voice, sometime echo
- Three: Echo most of the time
- Two: Broken voice sometimes
- One: Broken voice most of time, difficult to
hear
Customer Service
- Five: Willing to correct problem within 24
hours
- Four: Solution within 3 days
- Three: Solution within 7 days
- Two: Unwilling to correct problem
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