Rogers Wireless Pay As You Go starts the timer when the phone is ringing?

First published on January 13, 2007

I recently switched from Rogers Wireless Pay As You Go to 7-Eleven Speak Out Wireless. So far I’ve loved the 7-Eleven service, although I can’t say I’ll be loyal to them if an even better deal comes along.

At any rate, most cell phones have a timer to record the length of calls:

On my phone, the timer starts when the person on the other end picks up the phone. Recently I had a call that clocked in at 2:59 and 7-Eleven charged me for three minutes. This is great! After all, anything between 2:01 and 3:00 should be charged as a three-minute call.

However, I was using the same phone with my Rogers plan last year, and I know for sure that calls that came in at the 52-second, 54-second, 59-second marks were routinely being charged for the next minute as well. In other words, a 2:59 call would have been charged for four minutes. This leads me to believe that Rogers either has a wrongly-calibrated timer, or that it charges for ringing time.

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Related posts:

1. Why I switched from Rogers Wireless Pay As You Go to 7-Eleven Speak Out Wireless (Canada!)
2. A comparison of Canadian pay-as-you-go cell phone plans
3. Speak to a human customer service representative on the telephone at Rogers Wireless
4. Jajah.com: free phone-to-phone calls between many countries (at time of posting)
5. Countdown until: you can switch cell phone carriers in Canada and keep your number!

This entry is filed under Consumerism, Telephony, Vancouver / BC / Canada and written by Peter Keung. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

6 Responses to “Rogers Wireless Pay As You Go starts the timer when the phone is ringing?”

1. January 20th, 2007 at 11:19 pm
   Alan says:

   it DOES charge for ringing time. So does fido…which is also rogers? Iunno, but I think they do! Sometimes I have to listen to that bitch that tells me to refill and it still charges!

2. February 24th, 2007 at 8:52 am
   joe says:

   Is this allow, should consumer pay even in a drop call situration? I think the corporation has ways to get us! Yuk!!!

3. February 24th, 2007 at 10:54 am
   Peter says:

   No, it doesn’t charge for ringing on unanswered calls. But it seems to do so for answered calls…

4. March 30th, 2007 at 9:00 am
   Trandana says:

   Actauly it does charge for unanswered, at least mine does and it pisses the fuck out of me. I called it from a home phone just to make sure it was working when i got it, and it took off like 2 bucks. I didn’t even answer the fucking thing.

5. March 26th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
   Chris says:

   As far as i know for pay-as-you go there is no charge for unanswered phone calls, that being said if the line is picked up by a voicemail or answering services you will be charged begining at that juncture. If you call your voicemail account from your cell phone you'll also be charged per-minute, one of the many downsides to a pay-per use system

6. November 2nd, 2008 at 12:26 pm
   michaela says:

   i think that if u talk for 1 sec it should cost u 1 sec not a min its dumb and phones now days cost so much

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