The Great Mobile Phone Rip-Off

“So what are you wearing Mahalingammm..?? Ooh! That’s fii...iine!” as three bachelors collapse into fits of laughter. Remember that ad? “Get paid for the calls you make. Switch to Chaste Mobile today!”

Wow. What sort of a brainless moron do you need to be to actually believe THAT! You can’t expect to ACTUALLY get paid to call your aunt in Honolulu or her neighbour’s dog’s mate’s owner in Haldipur. Fuh-geddaboudit. And, no big surprise. The company bombed. Despite the suggestive name, hilarious ads and juicy claims. A quick look at its official website today revealed that they too have realized the repercussions of making blatantly false promises. There’s not a whisper about getting paid to call the aforementioned people or others. Instead I saw a desperate bid to revamp product names used by other operators. My opinion is that they’re just biding their time till they get a proper publicity manager who knows the ins and outs of twisting words to mislead people. Well, one thing’s for sure. They’re not going to get anyone soon. All the good ones are already taken… working for their rival telecom companies already!

Speaking of other telecom companies, SR’s Big (Punjabi: Vadda) Phone seems to have a very loyal clientele. Myself being one of them.

BigPhone, to tell the truth has greatly improved and made my life so much simpler since February 08. Actually the credit goes to the TRAI. More on that later. Pre February, their GPRS charges were an atrocious Rs. 49/- p.m. dissolving my SMSing capacity like sulphuric acid dissolves limestone. Even SMSes, were painful on the wallet at Rs 2 per pulse. And making calls was absolutely out of the realm of my world. Rs 4? Crazy, are you?

And then there was light. Along came the TRAI (Telecom Regulation Authority of India) and its tariff regulation act and the abolition of Access Deficit Charges (ADC). ADC was initially introduced for making up the money required to maintain telecommunication services in rural reaches of our country. But it soon began to eat into the pockets of the metro-men and the heads of the corrupt sharks in plush offices. So TRAI decides to cancel ADC charges. Similarly for tariff regulation, TRAI conducted a statistical survey and found that telecom companies never have to spend more than 75 paise on calls; 2.05 per minute in the worst case scenario. Hence it imposed a ceiling tariff of Rs 2.4 per minute on operators. Now all this data was collected a couple of years back, so a drop in call-costs for the operator is certain as the traffic has increased exponentially ever since.

Now, obviously, where there is truth, there will be fire. Telecom companies expressed their indignance by pulling up their socks for a slew of “value-added services”, among whom my very own BigPhone is, possibly, the most active in this regard. My GPRS now comes free of rental (only charges of 1paisa per kb data transfer apply) (Say Hallelujah!). I can now send SMSes to any network anywhere for just 20 paise. Calls to other BigPhone mobiles come at half a rupee. And I have great network coverage in all the right places. Life couldn’t be better.

But BigPhone has its own share of thumbs-downs. The SMS plan I mentioned just now is labeled as “free”. I guess I’m supposed to ignore the fact that I pay a rental of Rs 100 a month to get 500 messages. 500! Yes 500. I nvr relzd it, bt I do txt tht mch J Hehe. But what about normal people whose thumbs haven’t atrophied yet? They still need to shell out Rs 1.50 per pulse. Why, today’s newspaper proclaims that transferring data from the Hubble Space Telescope to NASA is cheaper than sending a text message!

Take the example of Chaste Mobile. And ad on their site proclaims their Caller Tune service runs thus (Directly Copy-Pasted): Cost of Service

Monthly Subscription charges are Rs. 30 Download Charges per tone is Rs. 15 valid for 90 days. (Auto renewal every 90 days for Rs. 15) Download Charges per Shuffle Album is Rs. 45 for 90 days (Auto renewal every 90 days for Rs. 45) All calls to ******* are charged at Rs 6 per min You do the math. Consider a 10 minute call to arrange for someone else to hear “Mauja Hi Mauja” for 3 months. (30*3) + 15 + 15 + (6*10) = 180 (I hope I totaled it right). And if you want to brag a bit more and Jab We Met goes out of the loop, shell out another 15 bucks to get the latest Race song. Which person in their right mind would waste their money like this?! And of course these rates were advertised only in fine print at the end of all the usual colourful pompous claims. Most people will miss it. It’s like they say. Experience is the best teacher.

There have been times when my Dad has innocently dialed one of those 6-digit value added service numbers “just out of curiosity” and disconnected without really buying anything, but received a bill of Rs 50 for the same. Call charges, dude! Rs 8 per minute! And even if he HAS subscribed to anything, he can’t unsubscribe because the 6-digit numbers keep changing and Customer Care can’t help. So now he’s stuck with this caller tune – “Main zindagi ka saath nibhataa chala gaya!” since over a year and can’t do anything about it but pay Rs 30 every month for something he doesn’t want.

I have such a saga of my own to tell. I’d successfully hunted down my service people and asked them to cancel the Caller Tune subscription on my phone once. They did remove the ‘dhin-chak’ song I’d chosen, but put their signature pug dog-song in its place and contentedly cut the rental the next month without my knowledge. You see, I don’t call my own number so I didn’t realize that the song was there. Sic.

And don’t even get me started on network coverage.

I’m sure that if I don’t get a placement after completing my BTech, HawaTel will hire me on the spot as the female who announces “The HawaTel subscriber you’re trying to reach is currently unavailable. Please try again later”. I can imitate this line perfectly and can even do the music jingle that comes along with it, thanks to the fact that more than half my friends have HawaTel phones that are never EVER within network coverage. Sigh.

Anyway my word processor says it’s been 1092 words since I started and my neck tells me -“get off the comp and let me relax!” So I’ll stop cribbing now. Be back with more later.

Signing off

El Buscador

An afterthought: Just to spread the consumer awareness, let me provide you a link that every mobile subscriber needs to see. It has the real laws on it. Click here.