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The prepaid call and text cards being sold to mobile phone subscribers for P300 contains the following instructions: “Use or consume the value of this card within sixty (60) days from first use”.

 

Whenever phone subscribers receive transfer of any amount of load to their mobile phones, that load will expire used or unused in so many days, according to the amount transferred.

 

One company allows unlimited text and calls but the subscriber must pay the company P30 which is “good for 3 days”. If the subscriber cannot consume the load in three days, his load will expire.

 

In all the above instances, the subscriber is forced to make calls or send more SMS messages to consume his load before it expires. If he does not do so, the subscriber loses the cost of the unused load. Or, to state it differently, the phone companies get paid for service that they have not rendered to the phone subscribers.

 

This is an unfair trade practice that benefits only the phone companies for, generally, people use their phones only whenever they need to communicate. It is true that some people love to text or call for whatever purpose. But it is their own decision and they must carry the cost of use of the phone.

 

To be fair, I suggest that the value of the load should be made available for use at the convenience of the phone subscriber, having paid good money for it, without expiry date, or until the load is used up or consumed. The phone load is not like any commodity where an expiry date is required to be indicated for the protection of the health of the buyer.

 

Sometime ago, I exposed, and the phone companies apparently stopped, the practice of surreptitiously charging phone subscribers P15 for every unsolicited message they send to their subscribers’ phones. I estimated that even if only one such message was received by and charged every day to each of the 22 million subscribers then reported by one phone company, the income of that phone company from unsolicited messages sent was a staggering P118,800 million for one year! No wonder the company could afford to declare and pay dividends at least three times every year.

 

Calling the attention of our lawmakers and the National Telecommunication Commission (NTC): There ought to be a law to protect mobile phone subscribers from the inordinate greed of the phone companies.

 

as of 03/23/2009 4:05 PM

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