Am really surprised by the positive reviews given for Uninor on this boards because my experience has been completely different. I am not a fictitious user but a real user of the services of the mobile telephony service provider under discussion and my number is 9061430091 and readers of this review are free to check up on me if they want to verify my narration here ( I intend to discontinue Uninor shortly and so in case anyone wants to check the veracity of this review, they are requested to do so in a short time.)
I belong to a mid sized town in Kerala called Mavelikara where almost all the cellular phone providers have an excellent coverage. Uninor started its operation in our town along with Tata Docomo inOctober 2009. I took my connection in December 2009 and my wife took a Tata Docomo Connection at the same time. My review here will be divided into two parts - the initial experience and the experience after around8 months of usage. Wherever possible, I shall try and compare the services of Uninor with that of Tata-Docomo.
In the initial phase of my usage of Uninor, the main problem was lack of coverage. The coverage was extremely poor with Uninor fleecing its customers to built the infrastructure. This should be noted by people in Mumbai where Uninor is planning to start operations soon. Irrespective of the discounts offered to the customers, they would still be short changed since the coverage is virtually non existent or inadequate.This causes frequent droppage of calls in the first minute itself, where a set up charge is involved. Redialing the same number, means an additional call set charge. This really works in advantage of Uninor, since the more call drops in the first minute, the more they will be able to levy a set up charge from you.As a result you end up losing money inspite of all the discounts they give you to lure you. They use your money to build up their infrastructure. And if you call up Customer Care Center, they very sweetly tell youthat they are new and have infrastructural problems which hey cannot do anything.
Compare this with the services of TATA-DOCOMO which also started services at the same time. Crystal clear calls and transparent 1sec call charges without the complexities of differential pricing for first and subsequent minutes and wasted money for redialling dropped calls.
And now eight months down the line, while quality of calls have improved significantly, Uninor has started resorting to devious methods to fleece the customers of their money. A few days back, I received an SMS from them saying that " My Tunes" has been activated on my phone and noticed that Rs.40 had been debited from my account. I never subscribed to this service nor has anyone asked my permission to do so. Just like that Uninor thought that I needed the services and unilaterally took the decision o do so. I called up Customer Service to bring this to their notice and claim a refund.
I was told that their systems are down and that they couldn’t do anything to help me. I was advised to call in the next day which I did and I was given the same answer. On the third day however, their systems were alright and they took my complaint, gave me a service request number (SR 1 6242628423) and assured me resolution within 3 days ( an additional 3 days, mind you and a total of 6 days from the day of this happening).
After having waited patietly for 6 without any response from Uninor, I called them again today. And they told me that I have to report such incidences before 24 hours and since 6 days have passed, they cannot do anything !! When I told them that I had reported the issue on the same day and that they could not register it because their systems were down, they said that they could not do anything about it. What a company highway robbers.
My advise to all those people who are planning to take a Uninor connection is " please dont ". I have used the services of various providers- BSNL, Airtel, Idea and Vodafone at various points of time. I also have used the services of T-Mobile and Verizon during my stay in the US. And comparing the two, I have a lot of complaints against providers in India and feel that they take the Indian customer for granted and shot changes him in many ways.
Basically, these Indian providers are of 2 types- the first type has excellent call quality but they dupe the customers on the billing which is not transparent. The second type has reasonably transparent billing processes but suffer from attrocious coverage and hence poor call quality. However, UNINOR leads the lot in that they have poor call quality and also devious and deceptive billing processes which fleece the customer.