HomeZone's Unacceptable Service Level at High Cost

With over three years in existence, HomeZone's availability and reliability of service is still unacceptable and parallels its disastrous billing problems (see our note: HomeZone Billing Woes!) While prolonged total service unavailability (e.g. multiple weeks in June and July 05) now are not as common as short periods (hours) of total blackouts in recent months, intermittent system unavailability remains a continuous problem. Due to the sporadic nature of the service availability it is hard to establish what percentage of call attempts (inbound and outbound) are actually successful - every HomeZone user, however, knows the nuisance of occasionally redialing dozens of times in a row in the hope that the dialed number would actually connect - but often to no avail.
While the HomeZone service level has somewhat improved since our public awareness campaign started and the multitude of billing problems that we pointed out have been partly rectified in the background by SamoaTel (without acknowledgment – but thanks anyway!), the real question still remains: why do we need the HomeZone service (which is really a mobile service) anyway? It is clearly not a substitute for a fixed-line telephone service: setting aside its serious billing and service level problems, it lacks the fax and internet capability, it costs SamoaTel separate investment in (GSM) equipment, maintenance and personnel, involves phenomenal cost for the so-called "boosters" (about $700 Tala per piece/customer), unlike regular fixed-line phone it requires mains power to operate (thus useless when power is off during cyclone), is not reliable for emergency situations due to frequent system outages, costs the end-user more to use than the regular telephone, undermines the fair and equitable distribution of communication cost and services in rural areas, and, last but not least, the so called "booster" is a potential fire hazard. In short, HomeZone is a bad investment and a disgrace for SamoaTel and a dis-service to the rural citizens who make up three quarters of the total population of Samoa.