Thursday, May 7th — Bundle ordering and zero-rated websites

Updates Changelog
#1

Hello hello! Excuse the radio silence on this channel recently. :wink:

Last Saturday we enabled bundles in-app (albeit rather quietly), but only for new accounts. Earlier today we enabled that for existing accounts. You can order these SIMs from the billing screen (Account Tab > Billing):

IMG_0054
IMG_0054750×1334 124 KB

Data bundles are aligned with calendar months, so if you order one and your billing date isn’t already on the 1st I’ll send you a message to update it.

We’ll publish a bigger update tomorrow :slight_smile:

Zero-rated websites

The following websites are now zero-rated on the network, meaning you can access them for free whether data is enabled or not:

nhs.uk
*.nhs.uk
nhsinform.scot
*.nhsinform.scot
nidirect.gov.uk
*.nidirect.gov.uk
nhs.wales
*.nhs.wales
gig.cymru
*.gig.cymru
hscni.net
*.hscni.net
nhs24.scot
gov.uk

(The *'s are wildcards, so *.nhs.uk matches digital.nhs.uk).

Nick

5 Likes
#2

Is the zero-rated traffic paid for by Zevvle or the enabler?

2 Likes
#3

We don’t see it — not sure if it’s our supplier or BT/EE paying for it.

3 Likes
#4

Makes you wonder why no one put in an application for an England TLD.

2 Likes
#5

We have a unionist government in Westminster who are generally opposed to the breakup of the UK.

#6

Yeah. You’d go to nhs.uk and not realise that it’s for the NHS in England. You’d think the NHS was unitary. What fun our constitutional mess is. :sweat_smile:

1 Like
#7

Yup a lot of people don’t realise that things like health and transport are devolved issues with separate organisations.

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#8

Do you have control over the zero-rated website list?

If so, I would consider when you are required to enable and use 3D Secure (by the 31st of December 2020 as part of Payment Services Directive 2 Strong Customer Authentication) perhaps adding common 3D Secure domains to the list such as verify.monzo.com (along with the Monzo Internal API domain so users can actually complete the verification, even if that means zero-rating some Monzo app traffic :sweat_smile:) and add some logging into your app that tracks new 3D Secure redirect URLs that need adding to that list. :eyes:

(Disclosure: I originally built Monzo’s 3D Secure verification flow.)

This would allow people to complete payments to buy data even if they do not currently have data, which is a surprisingly common use case particularly during initial setup. Almost every single UK network messes this up even when I directly tell them about it and the only workaround is to use WiFi or find a computer. :woman_shrugging:

5 Likes
#9

Unfortunately not (yet)…

Yes, we mess up the “need data to buy data” as well. :raising_hand_man: Not sure how that would work during initial setup, though — even it was zero-rated, there’s no SIM to use data with?

2 Likes
#10

By charging up front before SIM delivery, you’re fairly protected against this, and Zevvle may never have this issue!

In the registration case, I’m thinking more the providers who support signing up for an eSIM during iPhone initial setup for example, or the iPad data plan registration system.

There is a lot of opportunity to make the user experience far better when you have enough control to implement these and do it well. Almost all providers seem to implement zero-rated data to allow you to buy data, but don’t make it actually work well or work around the issue in a way that exposes them to huge amounts of fraud. :slightly_smiling_face:

4 Likes
#11

As a telecoms provider with visibility on the IMEI and the location from where the (e?)SIM is being used (so hopefully soon enough when Zevvle gets deeper integration with their MVNE), fraud can be reduced significantly as it’s an extra data point to compare against the billing address provided during the payment process.