SUBSCRIBERidiculous!
From today’s Inq7 edition:
“The NTC should revisit the circular because a new product has evolved and competition in the industry has changed. We are not against imposing standards because that is good for the consumers. What we are asking is that a different standard be set depending on what we charge consumers,” William Pamintuan, senior vice president of Digital Telecommunications Philippines Inc., parent of Digitel Mobile, said in an interview.
This is a very preposterous proposition coming from Sun, the mobile brand of Digitel, the third cellular telecommunications provider in the country. In its desire to lure subscribers from the big carriers to its fledging network, it is offering an innovative pricing strategy called 24/7 wherein you pay a flat rate of P250 and P100 for unlimited calls and SMS for 30 and 10 days, respectively, against the other carriers’ per minute charging. But this comes with a price: because it is still expanding its small network, it wasn’t able to cope up with the sudden surge of traffic. Just imagine a call setup success rate of 35 and 38%, respectively as tested by both Globe and Smart, the other carriers, and a high drop rate of 14% (Globe’s test) coupled with mandatory cut off every 15 minutes. This goes against the NTC (National Telecomminications Commission, a regulatory body) circular of 2002 which set a mandate of setting only 7 calls not connected for every 100 attempts and 5 out of a hundred calls being dropped. Not only that, SMS sent to SUN subscribers are not received or sometimes reception of these messages is much delayed.
Because of their shortcomings, they’re now asking the regulator to change the rules of the game to favor them. Ridiculous!
