Costs of the first minute billing change

[APS]

Last Oct Virgin changed their billing for the first minute. (I think this was discussed here.) Basically any call, however short, is rounded up to one whole minute during the first minute. Outside of inclusive minutes this means a 1 sec call costs 35p!

On analysing a bill (which is a big task with VM as an easily processed version is not available for download) I found these points which others might like to know:

1. the whole minute billing policy applies to inclusive minutes too, i.e. a 1 sec call takes 1 min off your inclusive minutes (this is in the small print I know)
2. the total call minutes on the bill only shows the total length of the time you were actually on the phone, not the total number of minutes charged for - this makes the bills very hard to work out. They should really add an extra line to the bill showing the total minutes charged for - might show how bad this is though so I can see why it is not there.

An example of the consequence of this is for one of our bills the total actual time was 309 minutes (just over the 300 min inclusive) but the actual number of minutes they tallied up due to rounding up the first minute, was 516, with a calls charge of £68! Quite an earner.

I know 3 changed to this first minute policy too not so long ago. Do all mobile phone companies charge like this now?

APS

[Halcyon]

I too think this is crazy.
For example sometimes I will call someone and it will go straight to answer phone so I put the phone down, yet I will have been billed for a whole minute of call.