Avoiding Bill Shock: Vodafone recognises new location technology

Strictly speaking, this isn't bill shock... its just bad billing, pure and simple. Bill shock covers situations where the customer's bill is accurate, but he/she didn't realise the true cost of the service(s) consumed, and was coined primarily to cover circumstances such as merged/converged billing (for multiplay) and subsequently was also applied to 3G data roaming (where no-one could really believe just how much the CSPs were expecting customers to pay for their data connection on the road. [The term may also have been used when the first telephone bills were sent out - but this was before my time!] Your commentary therefore masks an important point, which is that this technology may make the home zone delineation more accurate, but it won't (unfortunately) fix the billing issues if (and when!) they arise (as they almost cetainly will do... particularly if MVNOs become involved in exploting the same strategy.)

Incidentally, in many markets bill shock for converged services turned out to be largely a myth in the minds of the operators - consumers getting their phone/TV/internet in a single branded offering had rather more nous than was expected. They were, however, typically still shocked at how poor the billing - and particularly the resolution of billing problems - has tended to be in such circumstances.

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