Customers complain against unfair telcos

PEP TALK: The main function of the Commission on Elections is to manage Philippine polls so they will be fair, clean and orderly.

That alone is already a tough job without the Comelec having to distract itself by straying into the realm of partisan commentary and speculative predictions of election results.

There was absolutely no need for Comelec Chairman Sixto Brillantes Jr. to dismiss as improbable a forecast by the Liberal Party-led administration coalition that it would make a clean 12-0 sweep of the senatorial election on May 13.

As a sort of referee, the Comelec chief must not make pre-poll comment on the comparative chances of political parties and their candidates. The proper time for him to announce the score will come — after the votes are cast and counted.

Related to Brillantes’ saying that urging partymates to deliver a 12-0 shutout is just partisan pep talk, it is odd that after then President Gloria Arroyo was heard urging her followers to produce a similar 12-0 victory in 2010, the Comelec accused her of conspiring to cheat.

* * *
Opinion ( Article MRec ), pagematch: 1, sectionmatch: 1

TELCOS ISSUES: Our Postscript last Sunday on a flat pretermination penalty being imposed by cellphone companies regardless of elapsed service time drew email criticizing the giant telcos for being greedy and unfair.

It elicited other complaints related to services and rates. One email from telecommunications consultant Henrik A. Nyqvist brought up other issues that the National Telecommunications Commission and the telcos themselves should address.

Nyqvist said: “It is nice that someone still cares to raise their voice against the grotesque telco situation. I am a semi-retired telecommunications consultant from Finland (yes, of course I started with Nokia — a 25-year apprenticeship — before I moved on to the operator side in 1993). I have lived in the Philippines since 1998 and worked in several local telcos.

“What strikes me as an ‘outsider’ is how the telco industry is operating like a Mafia, basically because of a toothless and totally politicized regulator, the NTC. They get away with anything, make huge EBITDAs and can afford to be inefficient and arrogant, since nobody can tame them.”

* * *

COMPLAINTS: Nyqvist went on. “Looking at our situation in a global perspective, some of the glaring anomalies/injustices are:

1. “As you pointed out, the ridiculous penalties for PRETERMINATION should be commensurate to the remaining value of the subsidy the telco gave on the handset. I had a case with (a cellular company) a while ago, where I tried to terminate a 350/month subscription two months before expiry, and they asked for a penalty of around three times the full retail cost of the handset I got 28 months earlier. Grotesque is the only word I can find for such things. Of course I paid another two months for an unused number and then terminated for free.

2. “It is unfair that telcos are allowed to impose any LOCK-UP PERIOD for postpaid subscriptions if the customer brings his own handset, meaning the telco does not throw in any subsidy. On the contrary, this kind of customer still pays the regular monthly fee, which already factors in the write-off of the subsidy. There is no moral or economic reason for this practice. Just plain greed.

3. “The telcos got away with WHOLE-MINUTE BILLING even if NTC tried to force them to six-second billing. This practice, when analyzed against the call-length statistics, equals on the average a 30-40-percent increase on the per-minute rates we actually pay. Again, plain greed.

4. “The dominant player gets away with deliberately sabotaging the INTERCONNECTION with the smaller players year after year, while their legal department puts out fairy tales in the press releases. I know this first-hand from my stint as CTO for one of the smaller players.

5. “Philippine telcos get away with an exceptionally high INBOUND TERMINATION RATES for calls to the country. This causes the call rates into the Philippines to be higher than to almost any other country in the region. Since these rates are kept higher than the prepaid local rates, this has created a flourishing business of illegal bypass using cellular equipment, which manifests itself in a lousy voice quality for incoming overseas calls. To get usable quality, we have to call back, and are hit with — again — some of the highest outbound rates in the world. The telcos could reduce the inbound termination rates to lower than the prepaid card rates, and this would immediately kill the bypass industry. Talk has it that some bypass players are telco insiders.

6. “Telcos’ CUSTOMER SERVICE is stone-age level. Queuing in a ‘business center’ can take up to 30 minutes just to clarify a bill. Even to sign up as a new customer you spend up to an hour. If you try to sort out things over the phone, you have to queue on the line for 10-20 minutes, and if the thing cannot be sorted out at once, they take a note and promise to contact you back, but this never happens, without you calling and waiting again to ask what happened. This is simply a sign of total lack of competition. Understaffing customer service, while enticing more of the ‘masa’ with billion-peso spending on naive marketing campaigns and endless ‘freebies’.

7. “Since there are only two viable alternatives for mobile services, they are suddenly good buddies when it comes to repealing NTC proposals and agreeing not to lower BASIC RATES. There is no price competition in the telecoms market, a matter, which hardly anyone even notices. They do promotions only by free handsets and invented ‘freebies,’ but they never lower their basic rates, which are the actual money spinners.” –Federico D. Pascual Jr. (The Philippine Star)