Published Article:

Whose Family First? - asks Citizen's Coalition (continued)
Appeared in Samoa Observer 18 December 2005

 


In response to the multiple inadequacies and unresponsiveness to public concerns of one of the country’s most important service providers – SamoaTel – a group of concerned citizens formed a support group to raise awareness of the issues. Citizens’ Coalition for Accountability in Telecommunications in Samoa (CCATS) started its public awareness campaign with an article in Samoa Observer entitled “Whose Family First?” which can be viewed in its entirety via the website: http://www.CCATSamoa.info

Mobile Call Rates Revisited

Over the years the public has occasionally shown concern over billing inconsistencies of SamoaTel, either perceived or proven factual. Some of these concerns, upon further scrutiny have actually led to rectification of some of these billing problems. One such case, a few years back, was the case of mobile calls being charged at both ends (mobile calling and fixed line receiving). This rather unethical billing arrangement was brought into the spotlight and has since been fixed. As recently as this year, there have been allegations of charging for unanswered calls to mobile numbers, which SamoaTel refuted in a generic statement by the CEO on 20 Aug 05. While we cannot confirm this allegation, nor rule out the possibility, due to SamoaTel’s unwillingness to keep and make available historical call details on local calls (see below for more information), we opt at this stage to point out a few detrimental billing inconsistencies (Home Zone Billing Woes) and ask for a formal and direct response from SamoaTel on a recent announcement by the CEO on the mobile call rate change.

Mobile Call Rates Lowered?

In a short announcement by SamoaTel CEO, Mike Johnstone, that appeared on 1 Dec 05 in the Samoa Observer (see article), the mobile call rates were lowered from 30 sene plus VAGST to 27 sene plus VAGST (per minute) starting the date of announcement. This statement undoubtedly confirms that the rate of 30 sene plus VAGST has been the presiding rate to that date, which we all can confirm from our statements for the past few years. This rate, however, is NOT consistent with the published rate of 27 sene plus VAGST for mobile calls as listed in the 2004-2005 and the new 2005-2006 phone book. The question to SamoaTel is when and how exactly in the past, SamoaTel made a formal announcement publishing mobile call rates or that the rates were raised from 27 sene to 30 sene plus VAGST? We expect an immediate, formal and public response. In the event of no direct response from SamoaTel to this question we deem this as a billing problem.
It goes without saying that no disclaimer, no matter how cleverly devised, will stand up in a court of law, especially the clause by SamoaTel that “all prices quoted may change without notice”! Also, claiming that the phone book listed the rates incorrectly for two consecutive years is a puny excuse - where is the accountability for when and how rates are published? Isn’t it the responsibility of higher management to ascertain the accuracy of published rates and their correct implementation?

Home Zone Billing Woes

Let us look at what happens when a public body in a monopolistic position, loses sight of transparency and accountability:
In the previous article we made references to SamoaTel’s defunct voice-only, prepaid product called “HomeZone” which SamoaTel wants to pass to the public in areas deprived of true telephone service. First, let us reiterate that there is no rationale for the lack of fixed-line telephone service in many rural areas other than utter negligence and disregard of community service obligation. Second, we will reserve a whole article on HomeZones service level problems and the fact that it is NOT a Wireless Local Loop (WLL) technology. HomeZone, or for that matter, any hyped-up new mobile technology, is in no way a substitute for true basic, fixed-line telephone service with voice, fax and internet capability at equal rates for all. Instead, for the sake of brevity, we would like to point out just a few of the many billing problems associated with this product that we observed and factually verified for the past 12 months.

HomeZone Billing Playground

It is surely a matter of ethical business practice to establish and publish rates, terms and conditions, adhere to them while announcing any changes to affected customers (via public announcements, voice prompts etc.) especially on a prepaid system where the monies are collected before providing the service. SamoaTel not only breached the prevailing Terms and Conditions of HomeZone (e.g. account validity period blatantly forced to be “two months” (from top-up) instead of published “60 days after balance reaches zero”) but has not adhered to the rates it had published at time of service provisioning (e.g. initially charging per minute national rates instead of 12 sene per call, incorrect mobile call rate, etc.). Worst of all it has been applying incorrect rates (and rate structures) in the background for periods of times without any apparent reason, justification, or knowledge of affected prepaid customers. Some of these erratic rate changes were done in such a bizarre manner and without any intelligible pattern that makes one believe that the whole HomeZone billing platform has been used as a billing playground at the expense of the prepaid customers. The other logical question is: what is the basis for setting different and higher rates for the HomeZone service offered to rural areas knowing its restrictions, the inferior service level, its disastrous billing and its low maintenance overhead for SamoaTel?
These multitudes of billing inconsistencies and errors have been verified by our prepaid billing expert and for interested parties a partial list of these problems is listed on our web site www.CCATSamoa.info for your review.

Billing Secrecy?

SamoaTel enjoys a highly sophisticated system (SS7) capable of capturing virtually any switching activity and making it available for the billing system (even an off-hook activity without dialing a number can be captured!) And yet, SamoaTel is not willing to utilise this capability to capture local call details in a database and archive them as historical records in case of billing disputes or for police investigation – a standard procedure in the telecom industry. Instead, they have a mechanism in place to start monitoring and capturing local call details for a period of time upon customer request. Besides the fact that the output of the monitored records is convoluted and undecipherable by a non-expert, it does not do any good if one has a past billing dispute. What is the rationale for not keeping local call detail records? It is not a system overhead and the cost for periodic archiving of multiple million records on a standard magnetic tape is ridiculously low. Is there an element of secrecy involved? And why keep quiet on billing glitches such as in June 2005 when a number of landline customers were not charged for local calls but subsequently the charges were carried over? On the HomeZone prepaid system, while detailed call records are indeed captured, the call records cannot be printed by SamoaTel customer service. The alternative is to request a screen print of what they see on their desktop – surely a simple program modification can accomplish a formatted printout! Incidentally, from our long list of service and billing problems we elevated to the level of CEO (to no avail) this problem was the only issue he assured us to have been fixed! Is SamoaTel afraid to reveal billing details readily? Ironically, a recent request by a curious HomeZone customer to see the billing details for a particular month was met with a response from SamoaTel “sorry, there is no bill to show – the prepaid system takes care of the billing”! We are sure it does!

Conclusions

At this stage we give SamoaTel the benefit of doubt and ask for an immediate, intelligible response.
We also ask that call rate revisions be formally and accurately announced without mixing them with Christmas sentiments. Incidentally, if SamoaTel wants to give Samoa a real Christmas present, (instead of covering up billing errors) why not make the whole of Samoa (not just Upolu) one local area zone for the sake of equity. In a fully digitised network, and wholly owned by SamoaTel, without any interconnect charges to pay to another network provider, it does not cost SamoaTel a sene more to provide services to even the remotest areas of the country. Or perhaps it is time to pay attention to the universal services obligation and bring much needed true telephone services to rural areas instead of diverting money and resources on a mobile network with a short-sighted economical equation?

Last but not least, what can be said about a recent statement from SamoaTel CEO that appeared on August 20 in Samoa Observer: “…SamoaTel takes any suggestion of errors in such a strategic part of our business very seriously”. Samoans need to see deeds, not words.