Offline methods most popular way of dealing with cellphone billing issues
Although almost all mobile phones can connect to the internet, and although most, if not all, providers offer free contract maintenance pages accessible directly from one’s mobile, the traditional offline methods are still most used, according to this survey from goo Research and reported on by japan.internet.com on mobile phone use.
Demographics
Between the 30th of October and the 2nd of November 2008 1,091 members of the goo Research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.1% of the sample were male, 16.3% in their teens, 18.5% in their twenties, 21.8% in their thirties, 16.1% in their forties, 15.6% in their fifties, and 11.6% aged sixty or older.
I’ve recently started using docomo’s my docomo site (no English version) for almost daily bill checking now, as I’m trying to find out if their pake-hodai double plan is actually cheaper for me, as I suspect it isn’t as I use barely 1,000 yen’s worth of packets, but as part of my basic plan I get 1,000 yen’s worth of free packets, so I think I’d have to double my usage to get my money’s worth. I’ll know at the end of the month.
I also used docomo’s billing plan diagnostic service, but it was a really unfriendly service and did not link directly to my own bill, so rather than it using my last six months-worth of data, for instance, I had to retype all the data, and because it was done as some sort of AJAX/Flash hack, the browser back button didn’t work so I couldn’t easily try out different scenarios. Checking it again today it won’t let me use Opera 9.6 even though it says only Opera 8.5 and below are not good enough, and it recommends the just far too buggy Internet Explorer 6.0 instead.
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