So Econet Made A Typo, Their Voice Tariffs Are Not So High

We were shocked by the per second billing tariffs that Econet published in The Herald this morning. They wrote that their tariffs per second were $0.038. That translates to $2.28 per minute!

We thought it was a typo!

After probing the figure we realised there could be a typo there. “Could it be that Econet left out a zero and the correct figure was supposed to be $0.0038 instead?” We asked ourselves that and tried to call Econet but they were not picking up.

The problem though was that when you divide their per minute billing tariff of $0.2157 by 60 you get $0.003595 a number which is very different from $0.038 not just in the position of the comma. There is no rounding off error apparent here.

Also if you assume that there is a missing zero after the comma on the per second tariff and assume that the correct figure was supposed to be $0.0038, you will still get into problems. If you multiply that by 60 you get $0.228 which again is impossible to assume to be a rounding off error when the per minute number is $0.2157.

Econet says typo

Finally we reached Econet. Econet themselves did not seem to be aware of what their table was saying and had to do an internal consultation…

It took a few hours but they have just given us confirmation that indeed there was a typo in the table they published in The Herald. The correct tariff is $0.0036 per second.

This comes from dividing their per minute rate of $0.2157 by 60 to get $0.003595 which is $0.0036 after rounding up. Now that’s a math that actually makes sense. The earlier was more a mathematical error than a typographical error.

Per second billing, per minute billing?

All billing is still being done per second. Econet just displayed the tariffs represented as both per second and per minute for the fun of it…