My Experience with ESCOTEL
Like many others ( except for the young )we have kept away from Cell Phones until September this year. I always viewed it as a redundancy. The needless ringing of an ordinary phone is bad enough. However we Indians are by and large a talkative people and there is an insatiable desire to keep talking to somebody or the other. Hence Long Live the Cellphone.
Somebody left us a Cellphone when they left the country, so after a few months we decided to try it out with CELLONE, the experience was far from satisfactory, low signal strength, inability to send SMS to AIRTEL etc.
So I decided to try out a service which has been in this area for many years.
ESCOTEL.
To put it mildly , it was a big mistake. I got an ’’YOUTH’’ SIM card for Rs. 250/- on Thursday 6th November. There was Rs. 50 worth of talk time ( AIRTEL provides the entire Rs. 250/- as talktime, I am going to try that one out so stay tuned for personal impressions) . I have now got the AIRTEL card (15/11/2003) I don’t think I will have problems with this. Why ? Use of SMS or phone is immediately reflected in your account. And that brings me to the main problem. SMS bills in ESCOTEL are deducted once in 24 hours.
Do remember this is entirely a personal impression. I have a good friend who is very pleased with the service, that is the reason I got this. However he has a Post Paid connection which means he also gets a detailed itemwise listing. That in fact is the main reason for my disatisfaction. Draw your own conclusions from the following.
Here is what comes with the ESCOTEL Youth card. Well at least in the Advertising. .50p SMS, Rs. 1.20 per call at night.
A cell service is a long affair so one must have faith in their credentials and integrity.
We confirmed more than once that SMS was indeed free for the first month ( assistance officers Abhishek, Poonam, Arvind ... ), everything was OK until the balance suddenly became zero on 8th a Saturday. No calls could be made but SMS could be sent . The SMS also stopped on Sunday 9th November. I recharged the connection on Monday with a Rs. 400/- recharge card. This card by the way has a Rs. 260 talk time. Imagine my surprise to find that the credit was for only Rs. 152/-. On inquiry I was told the difference was due to SMS.
At the rate they advertise ( 50 paise per SMS ) that comes to 200 SMSes. At 3 to 4 minutes an SMS that is a good 6 to 8 hours of sending SMSes. I am sure there are people out there sitting and sending and entire day’s work worth of SMSes. At least I don’t know them . This for a cellphone where the only users are my daughter - studying for her 12th exams - and me. There is no way you can send that many SMSes without people knowing it. ( There is also a number of different rates for SMS , peer to peer is 50p but to Reliance it is Rs. 2/-. Fine but let us know the number of SMSes for verification purposes ).
Anyhow I pursued this, not to save Rs. 100 now but to save thousands later if we retained the service. So they gave me a very official complaint number 127512, another one is 127672 and told me that response will be available only after 24 hours. It seems ESCOTEL has a lot of Billing complaints. Everyone knows that with current computer software all information is available within minutes.
Ok if there is a que a few hours is understandable. But 24 hours ? You work that one out. Well that makes it sound as if important work is being done. On contacting them again , they confirmed what their record told them. Yes indeed Rs. 100 worth of messages were sent from this phone. And no they could not provide details . This was top secret information. Did it end there? Hardly. Yesterday to be certain no unnecessary billing would take place the mobile was used very sparingly. We recorded 1 phone call and 2 to 5 SMSes. The Balance came down from 135.37 to 104.37 paise. We have been repeatedly told there is no fraud or computer error, yes they have known of cases where Rs. 400 worth of SMSes have been sent. Sure on a planet which has a 48 hour day.
I would like to end with this conclusion that there is indeed overcharged billing going on for prepaid. This conclusion is based on the the following responses . They flatly refused to give me a listing of calls. Saying it was not possible to give a listing for 350, 000 customers ( well not for long!) as if each one was complaining about over billing ( who knows perhaps they are ). I also went to their website EscotelMobile.com you cannot lodge a complaint without registering. And yes try registering you just cannot register.
Another Rs. 30 deducted the next day. And they would not even provide me with the count of the messages sent. The details are really top secret they are not available even on payment which really every Cellular Operator offers. So it does seem that they are hiding some malpractice at a very core level.
By the way, I have got confirmation of overbilling for SMS in ESCOTEL prepaid cards from at least one more person.