odzer's blog

My poor mobile phone without a network

Can you live without a mobile phone for a few days? What about a few hours? Its strange that I am not a very telephone type of a person, I usually can just not keep up long conversations on the phone and I often forget in between what I am text messaging to someone about and lose track of the ‘conversation’ but as it happened today the phone did not ring at the usual time when I expect a call from my mother. I just thought she must be busy and then I started doing my work. Around two hours later finally I decided to give her a call instead and I saw that my telephone had no network. Puzzled I turned it off and then I turned it on and it would still not connect. I just tossed it aside and called my mother from my landphone. After that I again glanced at my mobile and there was still no network. Frustrated I dialled the customer support for the mobile company from my landphone and the following ensued :-

Me : I have no network on my telephone.

Airtel Rep. : Sir, there is a maintainence under progress your phone will work in 2 hours.

Me : No one informed me about the maintainence.

Airtel Rep : Sir, this is an urgent maintainence which we had to undertake immediately, we had no time to send advance notification.

Me : Oh I see, Thank you. (End of conversation)

In my mind I went hmmmmmmm! Maintainence in the middle of the day? Most likely they have some problems but they do not want to say what it is. Is it not unfair that you keep your customers in the dark? I mean these are the people that you rely upon to run your company? Okay I will be honest I have never had the mobile phone network just vanish before but would it not be nice to at least call the spade a spade instead of giving me all that bull about “maintainence“. So the network was restored after an hour or so after the call and they did not even have the courtesy to send a text message to apologise! I feel really taken for granted, I mean I pay these people thousands of rupees every year, do I not desvere at least an apoplogy if not a rational explanation. I wonder how many people missed out on something important due to them, I wonder how many people were in trouble and they could not call for help. Interesting thought. I wonder how difficult it is to send an apology message considering they ordinarily spam you with useless promotional text messages that are difficult to get rid off.

I guess I was still a bit mad about the whole Apple iPhone thing. So I took sometime out and wrote an email to the good people at Apple. I just wanted to let them know my opinion on their pricing in India. I did not really even expect a reply. So here is what I wrote to them.

Click here to read

Surprisingly they wrote a reply back to me very quickly, within hours really. Someone called Sheila from Apple customer care sent me this message.

Click here to read

What is clear for me after this email from Apple is that they really are blaming Indian duties, taxes and other costs for the price of iPhone in India. So now I have some really very interesting questions :

1) Why is the iPod relatively cheaper in India? It is almost a similar product.
2) How come other manufacturers who import phones into India can give their products at a far more reasonable price?
3) If the costs are indeed this high why are the operators not absorbing some costs considering they are not giving away an unlocked product?

So in the end I am impressed that they do answer their customers e-mails but I do not think in the end they really care about their flagship phone product and its sales in India. I am going to wait till the next year before I pick up my iPhone or some other smart phone product.

Note : Click here to read the previous post related to this one.

Email that Airtel so kindly sent me today

I have used the same mobile number and the same operator for around half a decade now. I am an extremely satisfied customer of Airtel, so far they have never let me down until today. When I booked an iPhone with them I had expected it to be priced at a level higher than what it is being sold for in most other countries but I did not expect such a high price. So you might say how naive, people can sell anything at any price as long as there are buyers. I should say sure. However Airtel knew that a lot of people were looking forward to this particular model and they should have arranged a better deal with Apple. If they do not have enough phones it is entirely a problem that has been created by Apple and Airtel, they are the one’s that have created this artificial scarcity.

Let me just say this I am not going to purchase an iPhone now. Thank you very much Airtel! I am very happy with my Sony Ericsson Z610i. Its already a 3G telephone and I can use it for roaming here in India and other countries with 3G networks extremely well. I admit I am a tech nerd and I will usually pick up anything even if it costs a lot more initially but not this particular phone. I am giving it a pass for now. Even though I know this will be a great product. I use a Macbook now and I love the computer in terms of its usability viz a viz what is available on the other more popular platform. Just for now I will say that disappointment doesn’t even begin to describe it!

Note : Part 2 of this post is available here.