By Simon Woodhead
As a reminder, in our full rate sheets you will find what we call the ‘minimum’ and ‘increment’ for each breakout. for the UK this tends to be 1 and 1, more colloquially referred to as ‘1/1’. This means that calls will be billed with a minimum of one second (the minimum) and then by each one second (the increment). Other common variants are Mexico which is 60/60, i.e. billed in whole minutes, Brazil which is 30/6, and the USA which is 6/6*. These generally tend to be set by the market and are before any minimum call charge or rounding set by us on your account.
That refresher out the way, we wanted to advise that Sri Lanka is moving to 60/1 for the whole country and this will be reflected in our next rate update. It joins a growing list of others who are some variant other than 1/1, some long-standing such as mentioned above, and others which are more recent. It turns out we’d missed some of these in places I’d never heard of, so the next rate update catches them all up.
It is common for international carriers to be very overt with these and bill them properly, just as as we are/do. It is worth looking at your other UK carriers though as they possibly are unable to do this and are just inflating the price such that however short the call, they’re safe. There’s not going to get any fewer of these going forwards. They’ll be profiting from dirty origin surcharges too!
* it is 6/6 on our NPA-NXX decks but 18/6 in other code-sets
