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Do you get charged anytime minutes when you place a call at 8:59pm?

April 28th, 2007 by Kenric

Every month I seem to go over my minutes on my plan.  Those minutes add up to dollars real fast at $0.35/minute.  A friend of mine once told me to hang up and call her back as I was talking to her because it was 9:01pm.  She didn’t want both of us to get charged anytime minutes for our entire call.  I didn’t believe that in this day and age, with our technology that a cell phone company couldn’t divide a call’s minutes into peak and off-peak.

I don’t know how many of you know this, but back in the day (like a few years ago) when you made a call during peak time and your phone call went into off peak time, the cell phone companies charged you peak time for the duration of that call.  So if you made a call at 8:59pm on a weekday and talked until 10:00pm, you would be charged 61 minutes of peak airtime for that call.

Don’t believe me?  Here is an old complaint article and a CNET guide that states “Make a note of when your carrier decrees when night or the weekend begins, and remember that if you place a call at, say, 8:59 p.m., you’ll be using your anytime minutes for the entire call.”

For the past two months I’ve been always wondering if I was getting charged for my late night off-peak to peak calls.  I finally decided to get my call logs and put this issue to bed.  Here’s what I found out:

I searched through my calls to find calls that spanned peak to off-peak and there weren’t many mainly because I was consciously avoiding them.  I did find a call that served as a great example.

The call on 4/09 went from 8:56pm to 9:02pm.  By the way, off-peak starts at 9:01pm, not 9:00pm.  So for that call, I should be charged 5 peak minutes and 1 off peak minute.  Since my overage minutes are $0.35/min, I was charged 5 X $0.35 = $1.75 as stated on my bill.  Just to make sure I checked a few statements back.

As you can see under usage type, Verizon has the term “Span” for a call spanning between peak and off-peak.

So I guess this answers the question for me.  VERIZON does not charge you peak minutes for calls spanning between peak and off-peak minutes.  I don’t know about the other carriers.  Does yours?

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