Cellular invasion of privacy
Airtel, the cellular service provider I have been using since a couple of months, continues to send unsolicited short text messages and unwanted calls that play advertisements. It also rips me off routinely with part of my top-up (recharge) amount deducted as ‘rent’.
I chose Airtel because I thought they had a decent roaming coverage across India. But I didn’t ask for this excess baggage of spam (text and voice).
In Malaysia, take any cellphone service provider:
- There’s no such thing called roaming service within the country (only outside the country).
- There’s no monthly rent.
- You can utilize the entire amount topped-up to make calls or send messages or connect to the internet. Each top-up provides, by default a validity of a minimum of 30 days.
- There’s no daily deduction for enabling access to the internet. (Airtel deducts Rs 20. as daily rent if you enable internet access, whether you use it or not, and not to mention separate access charges!)
- I swear, I never ever got a single unsolicited message, let alone an ad related voice call from my providers (Digi or Maxis) in all six years.
When they say Indian cellular industry is booming, it’s not just because of the large subscriber base, but also because Indian companies are constantly inventing new ways to rip off their customers.
Thanks to the largely ignorant subscriber base who really can’t decipher the meaning of privacy, this is a classic case of “when the going gets good, the greedy get going” for cellular service companies.
Customers in India are completely shafted, and the best part is, they don’t even realize it. And they (voluntary and involuntary idiots, myself included) allow them to continue, without uttering a word of contempt. The chalta hain (it’s okay) attitude sucks here completely.
I am, completely, in total submission, flabbergasted at the amount of crap, customers bear. I think ‘bear’ is a wrong word here. Simply because they don’t know for sure if it’s good or bad for them.
I wonder if anyone really cares.
Chetan, I do understand your frustration when you do the comparison - but do you know the rate of penetration the mobile has been able to make into the Indian markets. Although you may call these charges as ripping, I think an average Indian is more or less happy with the rates at which he can make calls from his mobile. Besides let’s not forget we have always paid rent even for our landlines, so why should the cell be any different.
And I think if the cell companies don’t charge rent there would be a huge number of people just topping up with the minimum amount and maybe never make any charge calls. To overcome this, I suppose the same has been implemented.
On another note, I read something very interesting the other day - Nokia sold over 4 lakh mobile phones on one single day - 19 October 2006.
Oct 28, 06 at 15:01Kapil, you make interesting observations.
If there’s one thing that waking up the sleepyheads across the globe, it is this fact. But unlike your take, I’d hand that to the people for being extremely savvy and stretching at least a little beyond their means.
At the lowest common denominator, I can understand the “missed-call” concept, because for those, they can afford receiving calls, they can afford cellphones (they’re cheapest in India), but they cannot afford making calls. Hence the “I’ll give you a missed-call” concept.
(People of India are quite good at finding ways to go around obstacles, only not adept at taking problems head-on. It’s just not in our blood.)
That’s exactly what I’d like to forget. Government telecom bodies ripped us until kingdom came (until markets opened to allow private companies). Now, the same are finding ways to tax customers.
Roaming concept within a country benefits service providers, not consumers. If regulating authorities make it unlawful to tax consumers for roaming, I am quite sure the service providers would easily come up and suggest sharing infrastructure and revenue amongst themselves.
May be you’re right on this, but charging rent per day for access to internet is just plain ridiculous. It should be charged only if the user accesses. This looks more like a deterrent than a feature.
And in all this, we never even discussed about cellphone service companies spamming us customers with text SMS and voice calls.
Oct 28, 06 at 19:04Yes, Chetan. Two things I will surely agree with you on:
- The per month/per day internet rental, bloody ridiculious.
- The spam SMS we get for changing ringtones, offers etc.
Oct 30, 06 at 11:33