In January, after much pressure from telecommunication companies, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) gave in to the immense pressure to approve their request to increase data and call costs. What followed was another form of inflation in the country that bit Nigerians harder.

Despite threats of demonstrations from different quarters of the country directed towards the new hike, Nigerians moved on in no time, but another phase of stifling cost of living took the stage. Data and call rates increase was not alien to Nigerians, but data abruptly ‘disappearing’ from phones and mobile devices was surprising.

The new experience was that even for the inflated amount Nigerians were now paying for data, subscribers no longer got the same marginal value for what they paid for.

Complaints across the internet range from inexplicable data billing to data abruptly ‘disappearing’.

READ ALSO: ‘It’s Deliberate’ — MTN, Glo, 9Mobile Subscribers Witness Slow Internet on Protest Day 1

“A friend called in to complain that he bought an Airtel pocket mifi that promised a free 30GB data for the first month for N20K. The data finished under 3 days of very limited usage. Everybody is scamming in Nigeria, even corporate bodies!” an X user reported in February.

Some even tried to monitor their data usage, but further questions persist about how telcos charge subscribers.

MTN for instance, has a carrier message to notify how much has been used per internet session, but this still does not account for rates at which data is billed.

For Glo, checking through data balance not only states the data balance, it also has a special feature that shows how long a user has browsed for a particular day.

Call rates, unlike data billing, are quite straightforward to measure. For instance, the MTN Pulse tariff pegs the price of calls at 23 kobo per second. At this rate, roughly N13.8 would be charged for a call that lasts one minute. Inferentially, N100 worth of MTN airtime should provide up to seven minutes of call time. The billing is consistent.

READ ALSO: MTN Data Subscription Delay Leaves Customers Frustrated, Stranded

To measure data billing, however, is a tad difficult due to some complexities.

First, some conditions may make data seem like it is disappearing. Automatic app updates and background data usage are the major settings most phone users often overlook, but these operations allow phones sap data undetected.

What’s more, streaming videos come with different video qualities. So, streaming video in different pixels would bill data differently. Also, the difference between webpages, phone quality and internet speed make data billing more difficult to measure at times.

Keeping these factors in mind, FIJ experimented with the three major telcos in the country — MTN, Airtel and Glo. The experiment subjected each telco to the same conditions.

FIJ’s Experiment Further Shows Telcos’ Transparency With Data Usage Is Blurry

For better transparency, the three phone lines used for the experiment were completely emptied of data. The phones used for the testing also had the feature that allows one to track data billing for every internet session — daily and monthly data usage.

FIJ purchased data plans that N1,000 could afford on each network provider. On the Glo line used for the experiment, the amount was only sufficient to get us 3.1 gigabytes worth of data valid for seven days.

READ ALSO: Less Than 24 Hours After FIJ’s Story, MTN Restores Ekiti Resident’s 1.49TB Data

For MTN and Airtel, FIJ also purchased the N1,000 equivalent.

READ ALSO: Lagos ‘Agent’ Sells Active SIM, Airtel Offers New Buyer No Help

How Much It Costs To Download A Mobile Game and Stream on YouTube

For the three mobile phones, FIJ tested each network under the same condition and for the same purpose — download PUBG Mobile, a mobile game from Google Play Store worth 1 gigabyte and also stream a YouTube video for one hour each.

After downloading PUBG Mobile with the MTN data, the phone data usage figured that 1 gigabyte plus 8.6 megabytes had been used. By normal standards, 1024 megabyte equals 1 gigabyte, but Nigerian telcos calculate 1000 megabyte to equal 1 gigabyte.

However, our MTN data balance was not commensurate with how much data had been expended according to both Google Play Store and the phone’s data reading.

As against how much the game showed on Play Store and how much the device measured, MTN said our data balance after downloading PUBG Mobile remained 2.54 gigabytes (2 gigabytes and 540 megabytes).

READ ALSO: Airtel Deactivates Customer’s New SIM Card for No Clear Reason, Asks Him to Wait for 3 Months

This means, to download the 1 gigabyte game, we were billed just 660 megabyte (0.66 gigabyte) for 1 gigabyte PUBG as against 1 gigabyte and 8.6 megabyte the phone said has been used.

The remaining data was used to stream a YouTube video at 240pixels (the lowest quality view) for one hour.

After then, the phone accumulated the data usage from 1GB and 8.6MB to 1018.1MB, meaning only 9.5MB was used to stream the video on 240pixels. However, on MTN, the initial 2.54GB had reduced further to 2.23 GB. This means that MTN said we used 310MB for a 1 hour video at the initial pixel.

Deductively, MTN’s data charge is inconsistent. Play Store tells us PUBG is 1GB while our device says we spent 1.086 worth of data to download it, but surprisingly, MTN says we expended just 660MB. For a low quality video, our device says we used 9.5MB to stream, but MTN pegs our bill at 310MB.

To do the same test with Glo, N1,000 only got us 1.5GB with an additional 2GB for night browsing.

The peculiarity with Glo is that for every attempt at checking the data balance, it not only displays how much data is left, it also calculates how long the line has been used to browse the internet per time.

READ ALSO: Glo Has Lost 42m Subscribers in 8 Months — and You Might Be Affected

When FIJ streamed the same video (still 240pixels) on YouTube for 1 hour, Glo, misread the browsing time for 36 minutes. They also showed that from the 1.5GB we got, the balance was 1492MB (1.492GB), meaning only 8MB was used for the whole streaming session.

However, our device showed that 65.1MB was expended for the streaming session. Here, Glo’s data usage was inconsistent with what was actually the case, the browse time, at least, giving every reason to distrust the effective of the network’s data balance prompt.

Things only levelled up after downloading PUBG Mobile.

When the download was complete, Glo said the browsing time had accumulated from the initial 36 minutes to 96 minutes (1 hour and 36 minutes), while the data balance showed 463MB, meaning 1GB and 37MB was billed to download the game and stream on YouTube.

Going by Glo’s calculation, if 9.5MB was used to stream for 1 hour, and both downloading the game and the streaming took 1.37GB, then it means they charged 1.3GB for a 1GB game, meaning an excess 360MB could not be accounted for by the network.

Airtel was also subjected to the same conditions as the first two.

N1,000 on Airtel got us 3.5GB (exactly 1535.64MB or 1GB, 535MB and 64KB plus 2GB night browsing data). After the 1GB game was downloaded, while the phone data usage showed 1GB had been consumed, Airtel’s data balance of 475.57MB showed that 1.06GB was used for the game.

After the video streaming, Airtel’s data balance reduced from 475.5MB to 411.11MB, while the device showed that the usage increased from 1GB to 1.16GB.

Consequently, the device’s calculation says we used 160MB for the stream while Airtel says we spent 64.46MB.

READ ALSO: Glo Abruptly Blocked Akure Businessman’s Line. He Lost ‘Lots of Clients’

Test Derivatives

The results from this exhaustive experiment confirm that network providers’ data billing is inconsistent. With proper cognisance to probable difference between data billing by telcos and phone usage as explained by the NCC, a simple test as this should not show a great difference, especially since underground data billers like background downloads were disabled prior to the test.

MTN, for instance, grossly undercharged for a 1GB game by billing only 660MB while overcharging for YouTube streaming done in the lowest video quality. If anything, MTN’s data billing cannot be trusted by customers.

Users would continue to cope with however they are billed. If phones cannot at least give a close estimate to how much data is billed, the opportunity opens for sabotage.