The Great Indian Tele’con’ story


 

The corruption and con-stories related to Telecom sector in India is not just related to the higher levels and during the time of license and spectrum allocation… It is everywhere in the system right from the business practices to customer service, to sundry services offered by hole-in-the-wall business, and including the customer themselves… the 3 recent experiences that make me say so…

Con story #1: I've been trying to get my enterprise email service activated on my blackberry. It has been about 1.5 years of futile exercise of follow-up with the Vodafone and Matrix customer services… Long discussions on the phone, boot – reboot, change password, set password, etc has been of no use… Now-a-days the customer service people when contacted over email/social media are asking me to call them… rather than other way round… the end result after such long wait and innumerable follow-ups I still do not have my enterprise email service active

Con story #2: My Blackberry (Storm) display was having a problem for past few days… It used go blank sometimes and sometimes the display is scattered and pixilated…I took the phone to a shop with a large Blackberry signage outside and showed him my phone.. The shop owner takes a look at the phone display (which was working fine at that point of time) and says that touch-screen display needs to be changed. No explanation on what the problem was, neither did he ever mention of checking the current phone display and then give his feedback… just a plain simple solution – change the display. I did not get the display changed… I left the shop thinking since the display was working fine at that instance, let me keep going for some more time… Since then (which is more than 1 week now)..the display is working fine

Con story #3: My phone is networked locked to the service provider Vodafone. .. Since the service provider has been unable to get my basic enterprise service activated…and since the number portability is active in India… I decided to get my BB phone unlocked. I check out with the service provider and they mentioned that they do not unlock the phones…and hence I checked out with some mobile phone shop keepers if they could help… Most of them mentioned that it would take couple of days and about 2K INR to get the phone unlocked… Since I did not want to leave my phone with them for 2 days, I decided to check out the solution myself… I found a website that mentioned that it cost about 800 INR and they would email the code immediately…in case the code is not accepted, they would even refund the monies… I paid the monies and tried the code they sent… and of course, the phone got unlocked – now, I'm contemplating to change my service provider…

I'm sure each one of us has a tele-con story to tell…


 

Santosh

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