Recently, the Telephone Department was alerted by our PABX suppliers to a new loophole in the call barring system that had come about due to Telkom's augmented Directory Enquiries Service (1023) whereby people on extensions with only local dial access could call 1023 and ask for any National number. Telkom then gives the caller the option of extending the Enquiry call to dial the requested number. While this was added as a convenience for Directory Enquiry callers, it does allow people who do not have National dialling access to make National calls.

It has a further problem that Telkom bills the call to the University at the National (>100km) rate whereas our internal call record shows the call as a local call to 1023 and is thus charged out to the user at a local rate.

Upon being informed of this, we decided to bar all calls to 1023 until such time as we could analyse the usage and devise a reasonable solution. We realised that this would cause some users considerable inconvenience and
that it would end up with our operators having to undertake the enquiries for staff, thus adding to their load. It was however felt necessary until the problem could be properly analysed.

The analysis has shown that while there has been a notable increase in the duration of some calls, the problem has not yet reached problem proportions. Just over 2000 calls were made last month to 1023 with the typical call costing around 50c and lasting less than 2 minutes. All these figures are very similar to those of a year ago. What has changed however is that there are now 155 long calls, greater than 3 minutes, the longest being over 18:25 minutes. These are likely to be the problem calls as it is extremely unlikely that anyone would spend 18 minutes on an enquiry. A year ago, there were only 3 calls over 3 minutes and none over 5 minutes. The cost of this 18:25 call as determined by Telkom would have been R16.28 whereas we would charge the extension for a local call at R6.08 resulting in a loss of over R10 to the Telephone Department. If this excess use were allowed to get out of hand, it could end up costing the Telephone Department more than we could afford and so this leads to to the following policy that we will implement with immediate effect. 

      • All staff with National dialling access and above will be given access to 1023 as before. 
      • Calls made to 1023 will however be charged at the local call rate (33c/min in 2002) for the first 1:30 minutes and at 
          the national call rate (88c/min in 2002) after that. 
      • The minimum charge for a call to 1023 will be set at the local call minimum (49c in 2002) and not the national
         minimum (88c in 2002). This policy should enable all 1023 calls that are merely doing a directory enquiry to be
         charged the correct local call amount. For those who use the Telkom feature to dial the queried number and spend
         more than 1:30 on the call, they will be billed as if the call is a national call which will be correct for national calls but
         will constitute an overcharge for a local call.

Thus if you use Directory Enquiries to look up a local number, do not use the Telkom onward dial feature as this will result in your being overcharged. Hang up and dial the number yourself. While we accept this is not a perfect solution, it is felt that it is capable of producing an equitable solution for all parties in most situations.