WhistleOut Guides
Guide to Bill Shock Prevention
Published
on September 7, 2012
Getting a massive mobile phone bill is one of those experiences that can make you feel sick in seconds and cause you to loose your breath. It's an awful feeling but it is increasingly preventable.
We've pulled together the key reasons that people incur an unexpectedly large bill and how to beat it. There's no reason to overpay on a mobile phone bill if you know what you are doing.
Remember, consumer education is empowerment and reading these guides now will save you money later!
There is nothing worse than receiving an unexpected excessive mobile phone bill. We look at the main causes of bill shock and offer tips on how you can avoid it. Read about how to beat bill shock here...
We all love jetting off for a taste of overseas culture, but do you know the implications of overseas travel on your mobile phone bill? Read more about what to do BEFORE you go overseas and rack up that massive bill...
The Australian Communications and Media Authority has launched a revised Telecommunications Consumer Protections Code aimed ensuring a fairer deal for mobile phone users in Australia. We explain what the code covers and how it might affect you. Read more about the TCP code here...
One of the most common causes of bill shock for Australian mobile phone customers is excess data usage. We examine how your mobile phone uses data and look at ways to control your usage to ensure you stay within your allowance. Read more about mobile data usage here...
We'll be adding more guides over time to beat the scourge of bill shock. We've written about bill shock on our blog and how call rates inside and outside of plan inclusions rack up at different speeds and how we think the ACMA TCP code does not go far enough. We've developed our comparison tools to dynamically compare mobile plans against your own usage. To see the difference visually, try our visualiser tool (explained below) to see a comparison of the estimated minutes in each plan based on your own call and SMS frequency.
Understanding Usage Amounts - How We Can Help
We'd like to introduce you to the tool we built to help ourselves figure out exactly where the sweet spots were in the mobile phone market. It's called our Plan Visualiser
Our Visualiser tool is available as a tab in our results tables and dynamically calculates an estimate of minutes available each month in each plan for the phone and price range in your comparison results. This is a dynamic tool which means that we calculate the estimates based on the call length and call frequency that you tell us in the advanced options.
This will give you an estimate in real minutes (not those hard to understand dollar values) about what you are getting each month in your plan. We hope you like it.