TCRA must closely supervise telecom ‘bundle’ observance

The move comes in the wake of a promise to set right burning grievances as to what the firms offer with respect to airtime bundles.

There are longstanding complaints of people buying bundles for, say, 300 SMS texts but with these drying up after sending only five messages instead of twice as many. Even worse cases were reported.

TCRA has thus moved to address consumers’ complaints on the costs and quality of services, but it can’t be expected that all the respective service providers will easily reform – if you will.

There needs to be an active monitoring system right from April 2 not just to ensure that service providers do not offer bundles without approval from the regulator, or that data bundle prices are within indicative prices as directed by TCRA.

Of course, there is the issue of some breaches drawing penalties from TCRA, but that may prove a long shot.

The new rules demand that service providers use simple language in data provision for ease of grasp by customers, while being disallowed from arbitrarily changing and twisting the terms and conditions of the bundles.

While this aspect of communication between service providers and customers has its level of significance, what it more helpful is ensuring that the bundle structure is followed to the letter.

Several provisions in the regulatory intervention focus on what the service provider ought to do to the customer, including issuing an alert on the usage of the bundle in good time.

There is similarly a condition that service providers insert a mobile app to help user know the rate of data bundle usage by downloading the app, which is likely to be of much use for data bundles rather than the wider use voice bundles.

Another point raised in the new regulations is that the service provider will not be allowed to reduce data speed during the use of the purchased bundle or accelerate its rate of expiry in voice bundles. This is a vital input.

But then one still wonders whether this is a matter of being allowed to do so or being disabled from doing that, at the cost of penalties.

To help customers more, the regulator needs to routinely monitor bundle breaches so that wherever and whenever they arise, the customer is appropriately compensated and perhaps an auxiliary fine is imposed on the provider.