Telecom service providers do not round fractions of a cent uniformly when billing for calls. For the most part they compute the cost of each call by multiplying the cost per minute and minutes of usage to arrive at a charge. Each charge is then rounded to a price ending with a whole cent when two decimal-place billing is provided. Then all call costs are summed to arrive at an invoice subtotal. For example, a 2-minute call with a rate of 3.6 cents per minute would result in a cost of 7.2 cents. Since billing is provided in whole cents, the cost will be rounded. The question then is how will the cost be rounded?
Providers either round up or down depending on the practice stated in tariffs or service guides. For example, Sprint rounds fractions of a cent up, while AT&T rounds up or down depending on the value of fractions of a cent. Charges less than half a cent are rounded down and charges half a cent or greater are rounded up. To contrast Sprint’s rounding policy to AT&T’s, applying the same example as above, a 2-minute call with a cost of 3.6 cents per minute would result in an actual cost of 7.2 cents, and the invoiced amount for the call would be 8 cents using Sprint and 7 cents using AT&T.
Awareness of how fractions of a cent are rounded with your provider offers insight into billed cost for calls when rounding is applied.
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