ON WIRELESS WOES IN INDIA

GROWING PAINS

It's good to know that US cell phone companies don't have a monopoly on truly frustrating their customers.

Standing in front of India's tallest Hindu temple, the breathtakingly beautiful Meenakshi complex outside of Madurai in southern India, I spent a frustrating half an hour trying to get not one, but TWO Indian cellphones to make outgoing calls with no success, on Airtel, one of the largest wireless carriers in the country (image via Flickr).

Both were brand new phones, with loaded pre-paid cards. 

Both were able to send and receive SMS messages. 

And both were able to receive calls from anywhere in the country.

Both show maximum strength, full bar reception of tower signals from local towers, and show various wireless networks as I move from one place to other around Madurai.

But neither has been able to make an outgoing call ever since I left Mumbai yesterday. 

And this was after being assured by the salesperson in Mumbai that the phones would roam and work all over India with "no problem".

Now if that was the whole story, I wouldn't be blogging about it.  It'd be just another tale of wireless woe that we all experience from time to time.

What makes the whole thing uniquely frustrating, is that Airtel, the wireless carrier whose pre-paid cards I bought, makes it impossible to reach any form of customer service via either telephone. 

Dialing the various numbers to get an Airtel operator, like 121 and 646, simply result in messages that the "number you dialed" is incorrect.

No outgoing calls of any type, period.  Not even to Airtel's own personnel for help.

Of course this meant taking half an hour of our touring time around Madurai to stop by the biggest local Airtel shop we could find.

After explaining the problem to not one, but three Airtel representatives who were keenly interested in helping me solve this problem, it was then their turn to experience the frustration of their own network.

They spent the next twenty minutes trying to reach their own technical support via their own Airtel cellphones, while getting "busy network" signals.  Par for the course I suppose, when your industry is adding customers at the rate of over 6 million a month, most of them pre-paid customers like me.

Of course, the only phone that looked like a land-line in the whole office turned out to be an intercom.

Since we were running out of time to get to the next major Madurai attraction, we had to cut short our effort to find help on the problem.  It just wasn't as much fun watching them trying to get help.

Or reading the various promotional posters in the store with Airtel's promise to make my "world of communication simpler".

I'm going to try and reach Airtel customer service via a land-line back at the hotel, assuming of course they're available past 10 pm local time when we make it back.

All this is to try and get the phones to work for the three more days we're in India before heading back to the States.

And it goes to show that the joys and frustrations of cellular service are as globally ubiquitous as Coke and Pepsi.

Comments

[kalind]

Connectivity problems are just a part of the enormous difficultied that a customer has to face here in India. Unsolicited SMS are ubiquitous. Almost all companies and Airtel in particular send SMS promoting some stupid service they have come out with. If it was once a day then it could be overlooked but a hapless customer is bombarded with such SMSs throughout the day. Even after unsubscribing to their SMS service (by sending SMS "NO" to 456 in case of Airtel), a customer is relentlessly persecuted. If yahoo were to send us SMS it would be acceptable because they are providing free mail service but Airtel charges a hell lot of money and on top of that rubs it in by sending such SMSs. Other problems include non-refund of deposits, disconnection of services despite taking large sums as deposits and so on. I think the Government option BSNL is the best. If these guys are going to trouble you despite charging such a lot then why not pay less for the same trouble by using BSNL?

[Vic]

Welcome 'home', Michael!

The experiences and frustrations you've outlined in the post above are, to put it mildly, benevolent as compared to some of the other practices that most (if not all) cell operators engage in, here in India.

For starters, many of them 'outsource' their bill collection taskes to various 'agencies' in many cities. It might surprise, even shock, you to know that many of these agencies are owned/operated by people who are generally well-known(!) to be the local 'toughs'! I guess you get the drift here.

What might surprise and shock you even more is that some of the banks and financial institutions here engage in similar practices too.

Out here, 'everything goes' and while one hates 'mud slinging' one's own nation in front of a global audience, I could not resist putting in my 2 cents - thanks for listening. :-)

[Yaser Anwar]

Seems like an investing opportunity for buyout funds and big telco. With so much money flowing in India, I think the market for communication will become efficient once we see a foreign owner, someone with experience in telecom i.e. VZ, Vodafone, buy one of the operators to gain a foothold.

Just a thought