Reverse charges for yahoo chat? September 14, 2010

The joy of smart phones - and the problems of paying for the calls.

Reconnecting

Yesterday I happened to notice my old friend, Pastor David ("PD") from Ago-Are, come online on yahoo. It is several years since we have been in contact so I greeted him, although I guessed he might be too busy to respond, because time online in precious.

Cyber cafe issues

I was imagining Pastor David in a cyber cafe, trying to achieve all he had planned to do. I know it is hard to get to a cyber cafe from Ago-Are and when you are in a cyber cafe you watch the minutes - you keep wondering if you will need to buy extra time to complete your task - another half hour? more? less? The minutes are expensive - but download times are slow - and maybe an extra ten minutes will not be enough - what if it takes fifteen or twenty minutes, or even more? Thirty minutes may be a wiser buy than three lots of ten minutes, but extravagant if ten minutes will suffice. All the time you are thinking of cost and minutes because Internet access in Nigeria is expensive.  I was happily surprised when PD was able to engage with me for a real chat.

A leap forward

There was so much we had to say - so I was not surprised that my question about where he was using the Internet did not get an answer. Only later when he said his battery was low did I realise that he now has a phone connection. Wow - what an amazing leap forward. My connection to people in Ago-Are goes back ten years, and I used to go there about once a year on a working holiday. In the early days the nearest phone connection to Ago-Are was in Ibadan, and the cyber cafes were in Ibadan too (but that was fairly irrelevant as hardly anyone knew about using the Internet). Ago-Are to Ibadan is a considerable distance. If you have a car of your own then you can make the return trip between Ago-Are and Ibadan in one day and conduct your business. If you need to use public transport it is not so easy. It is often best to plan for an overnight stay. Overcoming those limitations gave me my introduction to creative connectivity - communication strategies beyond the Internet and on into the rural areas. It is a long time since I have been in Ago-Are and it has not been practical for PD and I to keep in touch on any regular basis for the last couple of years. Now, suddenly I am able to have a yahoo chat with him from Ago-Are.

Cost issues

However, I feel  there will still be an issue of cost. This is recognised on phone calls where someone with no credit "flashes" someone who may be willing to pay for the call and hopes they will phone back - but I am not talking about phone to phone. I am talking abour Internet connections at my end and phones in Africa. I am not sure how to deal with the payment problem. I have the same problem with my friend Fola, also in the Ago-Are area. I feel I should be able to do a simple "reverse charge" arrangement when I ask him to engage with me for an online chat. It is not fair that when we have a yahoo chat it makes no difference to me financially (the cost is absorbed in my monthly broadband services contract) but my friends in Africa need to pay on a call by call basis. Somehow we should be able to share that cost, and some variation on the old "reverse charges" of long distance phone calls seems a fair way to do it.  It would be great if the charge could be added to my monthy phone/internet/TV services bill. My service provider would have an agreement with Zain or whoever it is that Fola, PD and my other contacts currently buy their phone credits from. As well as helping with online chats, it would mean I could pay the charges when I ask people to send me photos. I appreciate the time my friends and other contacts  give me, and the information they share. I am not happy if they have to shoulder some kind of financial burden as a result.

Fancy features

Of course as I start to explore this idea of reverse charges I realise there are some additional fancy features I might want to add. Unless the cost is really trivial I'd need some idea of how much it was going to cost me before I accepted the charge. Ideally I'd get information about how the cost was mounting during the chat, so I could call a halt at an appropriate point.

Keeping control

If the cost was going to be high then maybe I'd need some kind of features built in to save things spiralling out of control - I have lots of contacts in Africa and smart phones are spreading. There is a limit to the number of yahoo chats I can afford the time (and possibly money) to get involved in. Maybe at the start of a chat I'd be able to agree to pay either all the cost or only part of the cost of the chat. Sharing the cost could help to filter out potential chats that lacked focus. Maybe the reverse charge option would be a feature that only kicked in if I initiated that chat - that would reduce the number of calls that were from people with time on their hands just wanting a gossip. I really don't wan to be bombarded with the yahoo chat equivalent of "flashing" (when someone with no credit on their phone calls you, hangs up before you answer, and expects you to phone back). Hmm - quite a lot to consider - unless it is cheap enough not to cause concern.

The need for options would depend on how expensive the service would be, but even if it was expensive I would want to use it from time to time. It would be a great benefit for lots of other people too - not just me.

Present options

At present I only seem to have two options.

1. We accept things as they are. We have chats which, on my side, are completely absorbed by my normal monthly bill but on the African side are costly. My guess is that costs, for the level of contact I would appreciate, are at a level I would classify as "sacrificially costly" ie not paid out of money that might otherwise be spent on luxury items but out of money that would otherwise go on what many in the UK would consider basics. That is totally unfair and unacceptable. It is against all the ideals of inclusion and "flat world" two-way communication.
2. I have often tried to try to make things fairer by providing resources (out of my own pocket) to make communication easier. This is fraught with problems. I will not list them all except to observe that if it involves sending advance payment from the UK then it is clumsy to do (issues of how much to give, and how, and when, and what other urgent needs gifts of money may better serve) and even if I overcome that side of things it is impossible to do in a fair and appropriate way when I have so many contacts who have heavy - but differing - demands on their finances.

Even as I write this I think of the amazing way that phone credit was supplied to many people during the Pyramid of Peace project in Kenya during the post election turmoil. There could be useful lessons to learn from that. However that was more of a group-to-group transfer of funds and it was for a general project using phones to talk and text, not individual-to-individual transfer of funds to enable phone access to the Internet. It was also in Kenya which is well served by Mamamikes.

Any solution to this challenge?

Is there some way I can contribute to my friends online costs on yahoo on chat by chat and photos on a file by file basis? Is there something around that I don't know about and that my friends in Nigeria don't know about either? Is there anything on the horizon? I've seen PD online again today on yahoo and briefly greeted him. He told me he was in a meeting and hoped to get back to me this afternoon - but I had to go out. We have a lot to discuss, and some specific plans to make. It's not right if he will have to bear the cost of all our calls while I am contributing nothing.

Can you help?

Who can help me to solve this problem? Any ideas please email me pamela.mclean@dadamac.net or tweet me @Pamela_McLean - or comment below.

Please also share this with others who might be able to  help to move this forward. Thanks to smart phones we are getting so close to "digital inclusion" even in rural Africa.  We shouldn't fall at the comparatively small final hurdle of paying for the calls.