The cost of calling a South African business from a cellphone - particularly those branded ShareCall - is not as clear as you may think.And, in most cases, free minutes don’t apply, either.For more articles, go toOwners can choose to pay the full bill of incoming calls, or the long-distance portion if you are phoning from far away. Or, if they run some kind of “service”, usually in the form of adult entertainment, they can charge an astronomical amount for you to call in.
The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa manages these so-called “rate bands”, alongside all other numbering resources in the country. These rate bands include local, toll-free, shared, and premium-rated phone numbers. And although Icasa's further refined these in 2016, determining exactly how much a call to each will cost you is not immediately clear, and is still, in most cases, set by each individual cellular provider.
As a caller, toll-free landline numbers have the same result as zero-rated numbers, in that they shouldn’t cost you anything. The difference lies on the receiving business’s side, which usually has to foot the bill for the toll-free call. Ilonka Badenhorst, Managing Executive at Wireless Application Service Providers Association , says these can under no circumstances be used for call centres to generate revenue.
086 numbers are largely the domain of national call centres, and their initial purpose was to do away with a caller having to pay long-distance charges. Instead, callers simply pay the local standard rate - and the business must cover the long-distance portion. “When you phone an 0860 number, you don’t know what’s happening in the background, and how that call is routed. It’s a free economy, so each network operator can set their pricing models to whatever they choose to, it doesn’t have to compare to their competitors,” she says. interconnect agreements between the different operators, which Badenhorst says are “highly regulated and quite highly contested” stipulate how much one operator charges another to terminate a call on its network.
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