Ancom - Facturarea serviciului de telefonie

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Billing

Generally, your telephony provider will issue a non-itemised bill for the service provided.

You have the right to ask for your itemised bill, both when you have a subscription and when you use a prepaid card, to see how the services have been charged. Some operators charge you for the issuance of an itemised bill. As well, you can either receive it in electronic format or access it online.

Check the information in your itemised bill with your tariff plan. Pay special attention to:

whether the number of included national minutes/ SMS/ MMS/ video calls are available on the provider’s network and/or on other national networks,
tariffs applicable when exceeding the included national/ international minutes /SMS /MMS / video calls, itemised by usage network (on-net or off-net), or by time intervals (peak/ off-peak),
validity period of the extra-options, bonuses or other discounts granted,
usage order for the included minutes/ SMS/ MMS/ video calls,
roaming tariffs applicable, if you have used the roaming service.

Bear in mind:

you must pay the bill despite whether you receive it or not;
failure to pay the bill in due time may trigger penalties, service suspension or contract termination, while the payment obligations remain valid;
when your service has been suspended, you may be charged a reconnection fee;
the cost control service made available by the operators to the users is generally only indicative.

Here are the minimum information your itemised bill for telephony services must contain.

Minimum information to be included in the itemised bill:

billing cycle;
monthly flat rate for your subscription;
connection/ installation/ reconnection/ disconnection fees, as applicable;
equipment lease/ provision fees, a applicable;
other monthly charges for additional services;
discounts/ free services you have benefited from and how they are granted;
odd services and applicable tariffs;
full list of the calls initiated and of the SMS sent, as well as of the received charged SMS or calls;
total amount of the charged calls and SMS, itemised by categories;
total amount charged, including VAT;
call billing method (by second, by minute etc.)
a telephone number where you can request additional information regarding the itemised bill;
exchange rate applied, as the case may be.

The list of calls must contain:

each called number and each number to which an SMS has been sent or from which a charged call/ SMS has been received;
date and hour when each call has been initiated, when an SMS has been sent or when a charged call/ SMS has been received;
duration of each call;
total amount for each call and for each sent or received SMS.

About what, how and where you can complain

If you have read the itemised bill and you still have queries, send a complaint to your provider using the means indicated in the Complaint Handling Procedure, a document that you received when you concluded the contract and that is also available on the provider’s website.

The maximum term within which you may challenge the amount of your bill is provided in the contract and it usually spans 30 days from the bill issuance date.

N.B. For each complaint you submit, the provider must give you a registration number.

Warning! Check it in your contract whether the provider allows delaying the payment of the contested bill until the complaint has been settled or it requests the payment of the whole amount within the due term, being bound to refund the contested amount at the complaint settlement (usually, by discounts granted in the next billing cycle).

If you are discontented with the way in which your provider settled your complaint, you may address the National Authority for Consumers Protection.

In this situation, ANCOM can provide counselling and mediation, but cannot sanction the provider. Further information is available in the section Complain to ANCOM.

Erroneous billing may occur in several situations. The provider’s breach of the offer you contracted, due to a human error, may be one of them. Generally, the operators’ exchanges are digitalized, secured systems, their parameters are permanently checked, which significantly reduces the possibility of occurrence of a human error in charging the data traffic at the level of the providers’ exchanges. On the other hand, the legal provisions in force does not empower ANCOM either to check the accuracy of the traffic records in a provider’s exchange, nor to request the provider to make available the content of the users’ communications in order to check the billing accuracy.