I would like to voice my opinion that mobile carriers in NZ should move to 1kB data blocks. By starting this post, I hope to gain some public support and hopefully the carriers will listen.

It's fairly common knowledge that a number of NZ mobile carriers charge above the 1kB block size. My current provider is Skinny, but I see this as a broader problem for all mobile customers. After a spot search, far from comprehensive, I found the following examples (please correct me if I am wrong):

Skinny: 5kB blocks with 15 minute session time (for both mobile and Broadband)

Spark: 10kB blocks (session time not verified because they didn’t say on the page I visited, but I have heard it's also 15 minutes)

Warehouse mobile: 8kB blocks, Minimum 1c charge per session

Vodafone mobile broadband: Usage is measured in 10KB blocks, rounded upwards at the end of a data session or every 20 minutes, whichever comes first.

So you get the picture. The ultimate impact of this depends upon the session time, the data block size, how much data one downloads in a session and how much data you have purchased. A skinny Broadband customer on 60GB may not be as concerned as a Skinny mobile customer with only 250MB or less.

The worst case scenario is a user that only consumes small amounts of data spaned by session closures or timeouts. For example, making lots of tweets or constantly registering a VoIP client on one's phone.

An example (which could be wrong due to assuming worse case): Assume a VoIP client registers every 4 minutes, and consumes 2.601kB per registration and each registration is constituted as a session (because the data stops in between (i.e. worse case, so the impact would be less if every 15 minutes). After a month one has consumed a real total of 27.4MB. Rounding each session to 5kB however results in a total of 52.7MB, 48% more data consumption due to rounding in 5kB blocks.

Of course if you stream video on line then the relative effect of this rounding is going to be fairly insignificant.

I think it comes down to a point of principle and integrity by the mobile carries. They should charge customers for what they really use in 1kB blocks without inflating consumption by large rounding margins and minimum access fees (fortunately I have not seen any 1MB rounding, but some providers in Australia have done this!). To my mind, this would be in keeping with other industry sectors (apart from money rounding due to not having 1c coins). For some reason the mobile industry in particular seem to feel it is OK to charge their customers in larger blocks, be it for data or voice (per minute billing vs per second billing).

In Australia most mobile carriers now bill by the 1kB block. Optus used to bill in 10kB blocks but most of changed, though I am sure some still do. I therefore see no reason why New Zealand cannot follow suite too. After all, there obviously is no technical impediment in implementing such billing increments, the system presumably counts in bytes anyway.

Time for change, I think. I am interested to her your views. Mobile providers please feel free to join the conversation. We want to hear from you too.

QSX