How to avoid bill shock with online meetings?

As we adjust to the new normal amid the coronavirus outbreak, the trend of work from home has taken a pace lately. People have opted for online meetings and video conferences to communicate with family, friends, colleagues, students residing within and outside the country.

With several media and apps available on the internet to conduct online meetings, people tend to select any one of them and use it without being aware of the applicable charges. Though the majority of such online platforms provide services free of cost, there are some premium apps and software that may charge additional fees for their services.

As a result, people get huge bills and shocked by the result, they complain to their service provider for knocking them with huge charges.

Read: How did the telecom operators respond to the COVID-19?

Ncell message

As a concerned service provider, Ncell has shared a very important message with us. To aware people of the online meeting and video conferencing services, Ncell has shared quick information about it on their Facebook page. Ncell shared an advisory that will help people to avoid the risk of bill shock.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) also issued an advisory recently when they noticed that few of their customers have experienced bill shock when they inadvertently dialed international numbers. They make people aware of it as they came to notice that few people received such huge mobile bills while attending online conferencing or meeting.

There is no such awareness message from our very own regulator NTA yet. As in Nepal also the usage of such platforms is increasing, so we need to understand the charges while attending such meetings.

• Nepal ranks among the top 10 countries with highest telecom tax >>

How to avoid the bill shock with the online meeting?

Avoiding bill shock is easy if you become a little careful while attending such an online meeting. Digital literacy plays a vital role in dodging the bill shock. Enhance your digital skills to be familiar with the apps and online platforms. Follow the simple tutorials for such digital applications and teach yourself well.

Instead of blindly using any online meeting platform, you can read the terms and conditions of the online platform before using its service because some of them charge an additional fee in voice calls and other charges for dialing premium and international numbers. Being aware of the applicable charges while dialing international numbers or international customer care numbers will save us a huge amount of charges.

The same sort of charges is applicable to both prepaid and postpaid users. For prepaid users, you may instantly get the notifications for the decrease in your main balance. While for postpaid, you will get the bill with huge charges at the end of the month.

Apart from that, we also recommend people to use large volume data pack while connecting to the online meeting through mobile data. As the online meeting takes up huge data, you may turn up getting bill shocks after or during the meeting. So, it is better to check your data pack before actually entering the meeting and make sure the remaining volume is in GB.

We can find some people are even confused that limiting themselves in audio-only can prevent heavy data usage. No, it’s not the case, you do not have control over other’s videos and the presentation which consumes a huge volume. If you are on mobile data, take enough volume data pack for the meeting. Find all the reasons why the data pack is important!!

Having discussed the above points, we can assume that, next time you attend an online conference, you know what to do.