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Is it currently set to exactly the right time or is it a minute or two fast or slow?

I know that the clocks on my PCs regularly drift a minute or two every month, rather poor for a crystal-controlled timepiece I think but not too much of a problem.

However, when Telecom's computer clocks got out of whack a while back, it resulted in their backsides being hauled into court with allegations that they were overcharging their mobile phone customers.

According to reports, the clocks used to calculate the billing for Telecom mobile calls were running a minute or two slow so that people who placed calls shortly after 7pm were charged the full (peak) rate.

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Now you might think this would be a pretty trivial issue; after all, who cares if the first half-minute of a call paced at 7:00:30pm is billed at a slightly higher rate than the rest of the call.

Well that would be a trivial matter -- but unfortunately that's not the way Telecom's billing system works.

It seems that if you place a call just one second before peak-rates become off-peak, the *entire call* is charged at the peak rate.

So, just a 1-second difference in the time at which you start a (say) 30 minute call can produce a huge difference in the cost of that call.

Is this fair?

Well back in the dim-dark ages when computers were expensive, slow and inflexible devices it was probably acceptable but I would argue that it's an outrage today.

There's absolutely no reason why any telco should retain this old-fashioned charging strategy -- except that it can result in some very significant extra revenues associated with calls made near the end of the peak period.

So Telecom's slightly slow clock and its effects on the amounts being charged to people who thought they were calling during off-peak times is not a trivial issue at all.

Come on Telecom, update your billing practices and invest in a little software to resync your billing-system clock to an internationally accepted standard reference please -- after all, a lot of PC users already do this.

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