Sufferings of the cellphone users
Sajjad Waheed, Senior Lecturer, School of Communication, IUB
Four cellular telephone operators came into operation over the last one decade. Their overnight popularity amongst the subscriber is not due to their services or call rate charges, rather they got a "fertile" number of prospective users who does not have a chance in their lifetime to get a BTTB "land-line" connection in a legal way.Earlier, I had a 'pre-paid' mobile connection with the biggest GSM cellular telephone operator in the country. Since I required a BTTB in-coming and out-going facilities, I opted for a CDMA connection in the last October, 2002. At that time, the operator CityCell Digital announced that they would provide voice telephony, BTTB in-coming and out-going facilities and SMS service a service that is very attractive to the subscribers of all age. After I bought the connection, I was upset with their service while making calls either from the proper zone or while on roaming. I learnt that this situation arose because of their indiscriminate increase of connections regardless of the capacity of their switches that sometimes bounds their switches to shut down for a long time! More importantly, it is going to be eight months since I had bought the connection, and still I cannot send SMS to my friends or relatives under their networks, nor I can receive SMS from them! If one service provider cannot provide a service which they had committed and advertised before launching their service, then the subscribers can consider the service provider's commitment and advertisement as a total lie. I had communicated with their office, written them several letters, and found that still my messages do not reach my desired numbers. In addition, the locality I am staying lacks proper signal strength for making a call. All the calls are usually "lost" within a minute of call establishment! And due to their very bad network facility, I lost a lot of money over last eight months, and all the callers to my phone did lose money as well. In cases of emergency, I had experiences that I cannot get a connection even if I have tried for an hour or more. Besides, any one must say that the call charge in the cellular telephones is the highest in the South Asian countries. In no way, a call should be more than 1.00 taka [one taka only], including their operational expenses, whereas the SMS should be free of cost, for a 'pre-paid' user. In reality, the operators are charging 6.00 taka for a pre-paid call. Can some one imagine the huge income of the operators! And the time limit for the pre-paid cards should be related to the balance amount in the account it can be one year, or in some cases only a few days depending on the time the user exhausts the balance.
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