Do we need to pay for dropped calls?

AT 3am someone was chatting away until her call was rudely disconnected. She re-dialled, talked for a while and again, the scissors was at work. It happened three times within the hour.

She knew it was not the MACC, Bukit Aman or MCMC.

Nobody was eavesdropping, the network just failed on her.

Her frustrations can be understood and the receiver's irritation understandable. After the third disruption, who has the mood to continue talking?

The irony of it all is that the network failed on her in the wee hours of the morning when it was a non-peak hour. Why?

“Perhaps their engineers are too stressed at work, they need to go for a holiday before they drop permanently on the ground,” quipped someone.

Were she not on any plan with her service provider she would have switched operator as she had been facing this dropped call issue for sometime now.

But she is not the only one facing this dilemma. There are so many frustrated users out there and it is not just one network; two big networks are causing all the heartbreaks. It is also not just dropped calls, but failed calls on the first attempt, static or interference, and voice distortions, which make you sound like a gorilla on the cellular phone.

Dropped calls occur when the handover from one cell to another is not clean, so to say. And failed calls are a failure of the call made due to traffic congestion.

For every call there is a specific time block, say 30 seconds or 60 seconds, and every time the call suddenly goes offline in the middle of a call means that you are paying for the full block.

And if you have to re-dail, that is considered another call, like two calls in less than 30 seconds but charged for two 30-second calls.

The consumer loses when his calls are suddenly cut off and the providers gain. It is a known fact that dropped calls are the easiest way to make money for the operators and this gain by the operators have gone unnoticed in many countries as users are unaware of the implications of dropped calls and the authorities are not taking the operators to task.

Malaysia has had cellular phone services for nearly two decades now and this problem continues to exist; in fact, it has been a roller coaster ride for users for basic voice calls.

While we understand that voice traffic is on the downhill and data is slowly becoming “king,” it does not mean that people who talk should face these disruptions so frequently.

This makes us wonder if the service providers are really investing to ensure there is enough capacity for all the new additions they get every month, and are they building and compromising voice.

If operators cannot get this basic service right with 3G and WiMAX, then we ought to revisit the priorities for 4G, LTE.

If this were to occur in South Korea, the providers would be in trouble as the regulator acts on every single complaint from users simply because they take service quality issues very seriously.

Here you wonder if anyone frequently checks on the quality of cellular service any more.

And often you hear operators talking about enhancing customer experience,' I really think they ought to look at this very seriously as if our voice calls go offline suddenly, what customer experience are they talking about? This is bad customer experience.

The question is how long more do we have to contend with dropped calls and still pay for them. Shouldn't the operators be transparent about this and tell us that we have experienced dropped calls and refund us?

Perhaps we should go through the provider's dropped call policy to get reimbursed for lost minutes. The easier alternative is to switch networks or port to those providers that are willing to refund. Waiting for rules on dropped calls to come out may take forever.

Deputy news editor B.K. Sidhu invites feedback on customer's experience on dropped and failed calls and voice distortions. Please email bksidhu@thestar.com.my

First published in The Star on Friday April 1, 2011