26 September 2012

Bandwidth Monitor Misinformation

The telco giants in Australia are renowned for misleading the general populous, amongst other areas, from their advertising campaigns to billing information.

In this instance Optus is responsible for providing false information to users about how much data the user has left to use.

Telcos can quite easily have the excuse that there is an accounting ‘bungle’ or limitations of the system, but those flimsy excuses are far from the truth.

When one opens the summary page of one’s account there is a figure of how much data is left for the user to consume.


As shown in the (above) illustration the figure of 4GB remains for the user.

When the option of choosing the more recent events is expanded, the figure 5120Kb or 5GB is revealed.
One may be able to use the technicality of the definition of Megabytes or Gigabytes as defined by mathematics or IEEE standards relating to computer memory.



In no uncertain terms mega = 10^6, giga = 10^9, whereas computer storage  is multiplied by a factor of 1.024 (bytes).

4GB of data is equal to 4 x 2^20 = 4,194.304Mb, and 5GB is equal to 5,242.880Mb or commonly known as 4,096 and 5120 Mb respectively.

Optus have misled the consumer by an amount of 25%, which is unacceptable under Australian law.

Consumer watchdogs fine corporations for misleading the public, but in this case, Optus walks free.
 

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