A wish list to telcos

MANILA, Philippines - Mobile voice and data services have definitely helped many Filipinos be more productive and connected such that it’s now hard, if not impossible, to get through one day without a phone or Internet access. 

But many subscribers also have an ongoing love-hate relationship with their network providers over issues, many of which are old, that repeatedly crop up. 

So in the spirit of Christmas, here’s a wish list of 12 things that many mobile users are hoping their telcos will do next year.

1. Mobile credits or loads that don’t expire. How is it that the money we put in the bank doesn’t expire, but the money we use to buy mobile loads can vanish if everything is not used up after a certain period?

2. An honest-to-goodness broadband service. How often do you find your connection reporting that you have excellent signal yet Gmail won’t even load? Or that you are supposed to be enjoying turbo-speed Internet connection while all along you are literally growing old waiting for Web pages to load up on your screen? People deserve what they pay for so when telcos set their broadband speed, they should mean it.

3. SMS, MMS that are guaranteed to reach the recipient. How many times have you had to call or text again someone you earlier had tried to reach by SMS or MMS? Many times, text messages arrive when they are no longer needed. “I’ll be there in 5 minutes” is pointless if it arrives eight hours late.

4. More speed, more downloads, reliability and stability of connection.

5. How about more free content, but without being required to first text a number that opens a subscriber to a lot of unwanted phone marketing campaigns?

6. Dependable international roaming even when on prepaid. It hurts that even after talking to a customer support service personnel who guarantees that he/she has activated the roaming service, people still arrive in their foreign destinations to find their phones unable to roam.

7. Data plans with no long lock-in periods. In this day and age of rapid technological changes, how could a supposedly innovative sector like telecommunications lock its customers to specific services and plans for two years?

8. People want a telco that will clamp down on all the insidious perpetrators of phone-based scams and spams going on that have victimized a lot of people.

9. We all could use slimmer USB broadband modems that don’t crowd the USB slots on people’s notebook computers.

10. For the sake of old people and others with poor vision, please print the directions on the back of prepaid cards in a larger font.

11. Instead of urging people to spend more on telecom services, please devise more plans that will actually help customers save.

12. Enough with the Tagalog-English (Taglish) SMS announcements. Stick to either straight English or straight Tagalog.

If telcos can do some, or all of the above, then the Year of the Rabbit would certainly be a better year for mobile service, otherwise people would be jumping like bunnies from one service provider to another in search for a telco that offers the best carrot for customers to stay.