NPC Rep: Chinese Telecoms Make $17.9 Billion Extra By Charging Per-Minute For Calls

A few weeks ago, a government department up in Harbin called on Chinese telecoms to stop fleecing customers by charging for seconds those customers aren’t using. Now, National People’s Congress rep Xia Ji’en has picked up the flag, stating that Chinese telecoms make billions of dollars in extra revenue by charging per-minute rather than by the second. In other words, Chinese telecoms are nickel and diming, er, mao and fening us to death!

Xia used numbers from 2010 to determine that telecoms took in 876 billion RMB in fees for calls that year, and then estimated that 113 billion RMB ($17.9 billion) of that came from charges for time that wasn’t actually used. In other words, about 13 percent of telecoms’ income from calling charges comes from the difference between when you hang up and when the full minute they charge you for ends (for example, a two-second phone call is still billed as a minute). Supposedly, this works out to about 131 RMB ($20) per person in extra charges per year.

It’s not clear where exactly Xia got these estimates from, and according to the 21st Century Business Herald, some telecom industry insiders are already questioning his math, although it’s common sense that these “extra” charges do represent a significant portion of telecom operators’ calling fee income. After all, how often do your calls last exactly one or two minutes? As long as you’re not landing right on that sixty-second mark, you’re getting charged something extra every time you make a call.

Although Xia has brought increased attention to the issue, don’t expect anything to change as a result. China’s National People’s Congress is a rubber-stamp legislature that has little real legislative power. It has, however, become a sort of public forum for social issues during the two weeks per year it meets in Beijing, and reps can take advantage of the swarms of media that descend on Beijing during this time to bring attention to their favorite issues. Like paying less for mobile phone service!

[21st Century Business Herald via Sina Tech]