I have been a member of Mouthshut for a long time. Over the years I have accumulated some experience regarding cellular service providers in our area. I want to share this experience here. I shall be obliged if it comes to any use of fellows visiting Mouthshut.

I live in Kolkata network area & have used prepaid services of Hutch (now Vodafone), BSNL, Reliance CDMA & Tata-DOCOMO. The opinions expressed here are exclusively my own & therefore subject to personal bias – though I tried to minimize it. Also there is no conscious effort to extoll or denigrate any service provider. I am just writing what I felt.

I begin with signal strength & connectivity. In my local network Vodafone seems very good. You get robust signal in pretty closed places. It is not 100% ok, but seldom do I fail to get connected with Vodafone. Reliance CDMA, with plenty of towers, is also ok & it gives good voice quality. Tata-DOCOMO is doing well so far. BSNL unfortunately fails to deliver – poor voice quality & failure to connect are common even 100 mtrs from the tower.

But it is when I leave my local network that BSNL becomes the boss. In many places it is the only connection you get. Reliance also performs well during roaming. Vodafone performance during roaming, esp. on long journeys, is not satisfactory.

I have not yet taken the Tata-DOCOMO sim for roaming.

Call-prices in Vodafone are a bit high for today’s market & a multitude of bonus offers try to mask this fact – unsuccessfully. Reliance basic prices are also high but some of their offers, esp. the new ones, may redress it. With BSNL, even the options for bringing down the call-cost are limited. Tata-DOCOMO’s 1p/sec offer is attractive but may not prove much cheaper than 50p/min offer of some other vendors – if you think deeply.

Customer care personnel of all services are uniformly courteous specially in Tata-DOCOMO which is a new entrant. In Vodafone these nice fellows sometimes redress your grievance. In Reliance & BSNL do not expect any redressal. Once it took me nearly four months to activate ‘ 20p/min to two phones’ facility in BSNL It is no use venting your anger at them – the real bosses hide behind these hapless boys & girls. Talking sweetly & stone-walling the customer are two essential requisites of their job & they do it beautifully – I admire them. Again it is too early to judge Tata-DOCOMO, but will they be different?

Talking about the real bosses – policy makers – Vodafone & Reliance harbour some great minds. One of their ploys is to automatically activate value added services in your phone without your knowledge. When you complain the customer care personnel look genuinely surprised & politely insist that you have voluntarily opted for the service. So convincing they are that you begin to doubt yourself. Almost never will you retrieve your lost balance. Doing this maneuver to a substantial number of customers the company rakes in a fair sum smug in the knowledge that it is one man against a big company in each case. A weakling like you & me dare not call it robbery – it is business strategy of impeccable of gentlemen. I have not encountered such strkes of genius from BSNL & Tata-DOCOMO so far, but waiting with baited breath.

I must also confess here that Vodafone & Reliance has made me quite famous. I am in the calling list of dozens & dozens of business houses & they call me at all odd hours with outlandish proposals. This apart from scores of promotional offers from the service providers themselves. Actually I am more busy attending to these than calls from my friends & relatives. BSNL seems less enterprising here & Tata-DOCOMO of course has just started.

As a prepaid customer I did not have to face billing problems. Actually after hearing horror stories from several post-paid customers I had decided early not to put my neck on the guillotine.

I am not going into some other areas of cellular services including GPRS as those are usually not for ordinary customers like me. Actually I prefer to use my laptop for the internet.

Lastly for those wandering what the hell I am doing with four mobile connections, this is my way of using them :

Vodafone for all calls to friends & relatives & Tata-DOCOMO for other calls.

Reliance for the family – I have dispensed of the b-fone – the new Re.1/3min. scheme comes in handy.

Not using BSNL at present – they are giving 180 days grace period now.