Many smartphone users have complained about airtime and mobile data disappearing from their accounts, despite not accessing the Internet or apps. Recently in South Africa, MyBroadband findings proved that indeed disappearing airtime is not an illusion, but it exists for real and MTN was found on the wrong side. MyBroadband presented its findings to MTN, which acknowledged that the data depletion was genuine. It reportedly said MTN was charging for LTE. Therefore, this issue of disappearing airtime also highly depends on which mobile network operator you subscribe to.
Are you on Netone or Telecel’s network?
The reason your data is disappearing is probably ‘out of bundle’ browsing which is quite expensive. In short this is just how much internet access costs when you have not bought any bundle, be it a general data bundle or a social media bundle. For Telecel it’s around 10.5cents/mb, and it’s 7 cents for Netone. It is really sad that nothing has been done yet by these two operators. To this day you still cannot deactivate ‘out of bundle browsing’.
This means if you recharge your phone and data usage is not turned off, your hard-won dollar will be wiped out by background apps before you can use it. Sometimes you recharge so that you can buy a WhatsApp bundle for example and by the time you try to purchase the bundle you have insufficient funds for that. How? In out of bundle browsing the $1 gets you 9.5mb (Telecel) and so as soon as you recharge, WhatsApp syncs up and a 3 minute video auto-downloads and uses 4mb. Two such videos and your dollar is spent. Ridiculous!
For now what you can do is keep mobile data off before you recharge and first purchase whatever bundle you need before turning it back on.
Are you on Econet’s network?
If you have not already, deactivate out of bundle browsing. Dial *143# and go to Account Services, select option 3 (out of bundle browsing) then select option 2 (do not allow). That is all. Once it is off it will stay that way until you change it (why would you though) and so you do not need to keep doing this. Now you do not have to remember to turn cellular data off before you recharge. Nothing will ‘steal’ your data without your say so.
Are you on the LTE network on Econet or Netone? (Where art thou Telecel)
So you may have deactivated out of bundle browsing on Econet and yet your data is still disappearing. Or maybe you turned cellular data off on Netone and still your data disappeared. What may cause that? In South Africa, MyBroadband discovered that MTN had the same problem and they discovered that LTE was the culprit. The default bearer concept in LTE specification sometimes causes the device to remain connected to the network even when mobile data is disabled on the device, depleting your data in the background.
After the findings MTN gave out a statement:
“We can confirm that the depletion was due to internet data traffic being channelled directly to the handset via LTE technology.”
This was not affecting every subscriber of MTN’s and if this is happening here in Zimbabwe this may explain why some do not seem to experience data disappearance but some do. MTN claimed that was going to fix the problem in at least 30 days but I don’t know if Econet and Netone are even aware of the issue and if so if they are working to fix it.
There are some issues out of our control that may cause our data or airtime to disappear. Having shared some of the steps we can take to minimize this though, all we can do is hope most of us won’t have to deal with disappearing airtime again. Netone and Telecel need to let us deactivate out of bundle browsing.
2 Comments
The steps above are very correct but some networks are purposely doing this on purpose. Something urgent as to be done. Thanks admin for this update.
So, this is even a general problem. Subscribers lose a lot of money to these Telecom operators. I guess it’s due to the fact that government ain’t beaming their searchlight into the activities of these operators as they should, hence, these issues of disappearing airtime.