As most people know a lot of the ISP's are paying their share of the Telco Levy of $50Million
This levy is used to provide funding for uneconomic cell sites/broadband coverage amongst other things, a good idea I think.
I don't know what other ISP's are doing but VF are passing this on to their customers, not a big deal, someone has to pay for it, in this case VF charge each customer $0.99 per month incl GST ($0.85 before GST)
I thought I would run some number on this as VF claim:-
"Isn’t this just a way of increasing Vodafone’s profit?
No, this contribution is to help manage this increase in expected costs and to make these costs more transparent to our customers."
Running some quick sums, from VF's web side they claim 2.5million customers
2,500,000 x $0.85 x 12 = $25,500,000.......$25.5 million
So how much is VF share of the Telco Levy?
From the Commerce Commission, Final liability allocation determination under sections 87 and 88 of the Telecommunications Act 2001 for 1 July 2014 to 30 June 2015 [2015] NZCC 34
Pager 6, has a table , VF's share $13,791,711.50
So it seems VF are making $11,708,289, off this levy.
This can't be right you say, Most likely isn't exactly right as the number of customers are in flux.
I've been trying for several weeks to get some figures from VF that prove my calculations wrong, I've been lied to (Customer retention team told me that the ComCom set's the $0.99/per customer/per month fee, the ComCom have denied this).
I could understand if things didn't work out exactly, as it would be near on impossible to calculate as customer numbers constantly vary, but a ball park figure would be close enough, $11.7 million is no where close.
So I'm putting it out the for public comment, Vodafone, tell your customers how you arrive at this figure.
We can on make calculations based on what we can find out, give us some accurate figures
People who are with other ISP's, post here what you are been charged per month, is your ISP overcharging you?
Oh and by the way, I know VF can't do maths, they claim $0.85 +GST is $0.99, well it's not, It's $0.9775, 98 cents for the sake of rounding to the nearest cent.........