Woohoo. My persistence paid off. I have made the company credit the bill that they owed me. In addition to that, I have made them apologise for the whole fracas. I have realised that despite their claims of “happy to help”, they are among the most disorganised band of morons; just like the other operators.

Having a multiplicity of operators is not going to help unless they are brought in line by a regulator that has real powers. This is wishful thinking unfortunately.

I was thinking of the old times when I was dependent on BSNL’s largesse. I fought the shitheads on the phone, clogged their email servers and created a lot of brouhaha online for the same. I made them run around to give me a connection that actually worked. I made them correct the billing faults; I made them see through my point. It was a tough battle but it was only designed with one intention. We can achieve far more success in life if we are allowed to reach our full potential and not be constrained with the artificial barriers. People across the world are reaching out to new avenues; our development stops just short of South Extension in New Delhi. Thats the kind of “Gurgaon” model that we hold up to the world to signify our progress.

Making the company pay for their follies is an example that I wish to hold up here. It makes sense to be persistent; sniff out their potential weaknesses and hammer on whatever they respond to you. I emailed all the previous mails with this implicit knowledge that even though no one is going to read it, the company would be shamed to have a mess on their hands. The media likes to sniff out such incidents and I had plans to alert them to such “harrassment”. Elsewhere it would have been a PR disaster because one of the most important system of a mobile company is their billing system. I am told that it is a very expensive solution and needs to be robust. If people start having doubts on the billing system, they would desert it like rats on a sinking ship. It is perhaps for this reason, the telecom operators are loath to act on the complaints.

Further, a system should gurantee the fact that it not open to abuse. Mobile cloning is a persistent danger and there are many dudes in Palika Bazar who do it for a small fee. There is an whole underground system to clone the shit; mobile companies must be able to proactively anticipate these incidents and prevent them. Or else, it would be a disaster. An utter chaos.

I have made them pay. If anyone is reading this in official capacity, a middle finger up to you. If someone is reading this in personal capacity, dude, you are a personal failure to make a company worth it.

Tags: Billing Hassles, BSNL, EDGE, India, Media, Mobile, Opera, Telecommunications India, TRAI, Vodafone, Vodafone India, Vodafone India Crap, Vodafone sucks

Despite their brilliant advertising claims, Vodafone India has made a mess of it’s customer care. Why doesn’t it translate into effective delivery at the ground level?

I had made a payment for my mobile phone elsewhere; outside from the home circle. I was assured that the billing system would be updated. As luck would have it, the system didnot update the payment and I started getting messages and calls from female “recovery agents” to pay my dues. Surprisingly, they have a knack of calling in at such odd hours; they start off without even extending basic courtesies. I insisted that I had paid for the amount and I directed them to enquire from their Vodafone Store where I had paid the cash. They did not make any effort to trace the amount but instead chose to lay the entire blame on me.

All said and done, they barred my outgoing calls and I had to make the payments under duress. Although, the phone was working again after much cajoling; they took an entire day to get it “activated”.

My credit limit is more than sufficient and they made me run around like a scared rabbit. What is clear from the entire episode is that despite their claims, they did not bother to check their backend (literally and figuratively) and rectify the issue. It could have been very simple to call up the dud on the other line (through proper channel in their parlance) and find out the billing details as well as the payment made. Although, in the routine cases it sounds audacious because they have to take care of “millions of customers” but the fact is that they cannot afford to loose loyal ones. I have remained with Hutch for over 3 years now only because of their talk plans. So far, I have not had much of the issues with their billing per se but this one off incident has shaken my faith in the company. So much so, that its more of a hurt than anger that’s bothering me.

There are many other stories like these replicated day in day out across the country. With an ineffective regulator and lack of awareness, most of these nitwits are having a free run.

This is the problem with having oligopolies. The customer isnt the king any longer.

UPDATE: I have been updating on the forums as well. So far, no reply from the company.

Tags: Advertising, Billing Hassles, Hutch, India, Mobile, Telecommunications India, Vodafone, Vodafone India, Vodafone India Crap, Vodafone sucks

This was part of Steve Job’s famous “reality distortion field” and given the hype and hoopla they are able to generate, the hype was perhaps worth it. It has been just 3 days since the iPhone was lauched; there were hordes of morons who wanted to be the first in the line for the “iconic” phone that promised everything but sadly delivers not much in terms of value.

For the same reason, I have never favoured iPods. I’d agree that they are beautiful. They can be easily navigable. But they don’t deliver bang for the buck. It doesn’t always boil down to having the “best” and the “latest” and paying oodles extra for the “coolness” factor. Or that “I have it too”.

Apple iPhone generated a lot of “news” online. After all, it is one smart phone that has wowed the geek audiences. Most of the people were willing to ignore the crappy AT&T services that were bundled for over two years. And that the speeds of access negate everything that iPhone aims to sell.

It is a classic Apple approach to sell underpowered hardware and generate sales for incremental hardware upgrades for later versions. Perhaps they would upgrade the hard drive; change colours, have a better camera or make it work on “better neworks”. I cannot crystal gaze but Jobs needs loads of marketing crap to sell the future versions in the Mac Expos.

However, all this marketing hype has laid focus squarely on the “leaders” like Nokias and Erricsons of the world. With it’s crappy N series handsets, Nokia has not exactly been able to take the market by storm. Their marketing campaigns are squarely based on rolling everything into one which makes the handsets bulky and unweildy. I own a simple basic handset that helps me to stay connected; this is the future driver of the growth for developing countries and I believe that incremental improvements in the battery life or menus would help them to retain the market confidence. At best, the Taiwainese/Korean companies are gearing up to meet the challange from Apple onslaught. I doubt whether they would succeed in the competitive US market; however no one would deny them the chance to innovate. Nokia needs to update it’s Symbian OS which is clunky and slow.

I believe that the sole focus of iPhone is to test market the mobile media and means to access the same. As Internet becomes ubiquitous, the content (and the service providers) would chase you wherever you are.

I believe that the porn industry would squarely benefit from the introduction of iPhone. They have been at the forefront of the technological revolution and it would be interesting to see frustrated “jerkins” using the in thing to surf porn. AT&T is no stranger to this and they have been distributing porn earlier on.

It would be hard to do any justice to this post without linking on to what others are saying. Youth Curry raises a valid point about Apple loosing it’s sales in India because of it’s inept marketing and expensive overheads in form of duties and taxes. Unfortunately, Apple has been loosing sales to illegitimate channels which makes it worse from their perspective. Yet, noting is being done. I wouldn’t be seeing this phone till about next year. This means that only the black market would rule with it’s prices presently.

Opera Watch says that Opera Mini is a better bet anyday. iPhone’s zoom feature is nothing new; it was all there in Opera Mini since it’s launch. Another added advantage is the ability to use a virtual cursor by just using the keys on the keyboard. This makes is much more universal in appeal. Imagine using Opera Mini on the iPhone. I am not sure whether it would be possible to download and install Mini on your sexy brand new acquisition.

Early reviews on the same blog entry show that iPhone is slow. This is to be expected when a “new generation” phone is launched on ancient networks.

Emergic had a series of articles written from across the blogosphere about iPhone. (1,2,3,4,5) Much of it is the adulation of the “iconic iPhone” and makes no sense. However, Cringely hits the nail in the head squarely. He writes :

The iPhone absolutely needs AJAX applications for the phone to be a success on AT&T’s EDGE network. By pushing more functional logic into the browser, the bandwidth consumed per http round-trip is significantly reduced, making the phone apps faster and helping to justify that big price tag. The problem with this is that AJAX apps don’t always work the same (or at all) on every browser. The iPhone has real browser support, which is good, but remember AJAX is based on JavaScript, which in this case is not so good. JavaScript isn’t statically typed and each browser has its own version of JavaScript. Developers are typically forced to hand-code different versions of their AJAX apps for different browsers. With the AJAX economy dictating that browsers with big market share like IE and Firefox get most of the effort, that leaves Safari as a second-class browser and, potentially, a liability for the iPhone.

He feels that iPhones have been deliberately crippled for performance.

Remember that a key component of iPhone marketing is that the device will run a version of OS X, making it more computer than phone. When the iPhone finally ships and some techies have voided their warranties and torn the thing apart, they’ll probably find it uses a processor running at a gigahertz or more — by far the fastest processor ever put in a mobile phone — a processor more powerful than that in my Mom’s PC. With all that power locked inside, of course some users will want to imagine their iPhone AS their PC, which Apple — at least for now — would rather not enable because it might hurt Macintosh sales. So they’ve hobbled the iPhone with essentially the same crappy text entry capability as on any other phone.

Where does that leave Indian market in all that? Apple has been smart enough to realise that the growth story being talked off here is all hogwash. The number of the new handset sales does not justify the accrued numbers. However, there are no concrete statistics for the second hand handset sales. The number may be higher or lower than the professed numbers.

Further, the market is maturing in terms of people willing to try out the value added services. Yet, the billing hassles have not yet been resolved. Another problem is that we hardly get to see demand for “unlimited access”; I believe that some of the operators have such schemes. It truly defines “world wide wait” (www) as it is intended to be. The speed of access is pitiable as compared to dial up for a contrast.

Lets wait and watch for it’s debut in India.

Update: This has been crossposted on Desicritics.

Tags: Appeal, Billing Hassles, DTH, EDGE, handsets, India, Internet, iPhone, Java, Media, Mobile, Opera, Opera Mini, Telecommunications India, Value Added Services