Namaste!
At Ncell, the upgrade of the network continues as was the case during the whole year. Now we go to full Internet Protocol, MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching), to have enough capacity for increasing traffic. Everything went well until Thursday; unfortunately, many of you experienced the hick up: one IP router got overloaded, due to some weird process in it. This caused a signaling problem between some switches and business support system. Domestic calls and sms were down for about two hours but data and international traffic was working normally. About 2 Million people mainly in Bagmati were affected. These kinds of things are pretty “normal” in the IP world; our competitor’s network was out for 18 hours in Norway last summer. BUT, these sorts of things should not happen! My sincere apologies for any inconvenience caused to our valued customers.
The big issue in overcharging is getting better. To make the prices and taxes transparent to you, we initially changed the charging mechanism in recharge cards in October 2011. Before, when you bought 100 Rupee card, you paid the ownership tax on top of it. The two rupee we transfered to tax authorities on behalf of you as ownership tax. It made 102. This additional Rs 2 gave way to the POS to charge to nearest round figure of Rs 5 (made 105), which was not correct and transparent. Nowadays we have reduced MRP with taxes to Rs 100 and you get a balance of 98.04 compared to Rs 100 earlier on your account. (100 minus 98.04 is the tax part which we pay to government). When we introduced the new scheme and MRP, some 60 % of the kiosks begun overcharging 5 rupees as a routine. The official commission for the channel has remained same all the time. We have had meetings with our distributors who control the dealers, and dealers further should control POS: they are committed to rectify this bad customer experience, and also the commission structure within the channel was changed so that POS get bigger stake of the total commission. At the same time, we have terminated 114 agreements with our authorized POS. Just to remind again: DO NOT PAY ANY EXTRA. 50 Rupee scratch card shall cost 50, 100 is 100 and so fort.
There has been quite a lot of feed back in many issues. Thank you for your comments. Based on also your feedback, you can now have the night rate to Sajilo tariff. Many of you compare prices with NTC. I have said in my earlier blog that we are two different kinds of operators: we at Ncell want to be very much quality oriented, whereas NTC seems to believe that price is the main value creator for customers. Good so. It is important to have alternatives for consumers to choose. At Ncell we try to bring you the best quality of Customer Experience, sometimes with higher prices; offering best quality with lowest prices would put us in insolvency in longer run. If you look at base tariffs only, our on net is NPR 1.99 per minute and NTC is offering 1.50 for the same. We upgraded our billing system in April and can offer variety of prices schemes instead: e.g. with Friends and Family service you can talk by .99 a minute. Lowest offers have been at the level of 0.50. What it comes to mobile internet, our data price is definitely higher than NTC’s but the real surfing speed is more than double. And so on. And not to forget cross subsidizing of NTC fixed-Mobile: you pay 53 paisa for NTC, every minute you call to their fixed line number. Unfortunately, we have to collect it from you and credit further to NTC. Unfair competition and extra charge for you all. But you are right, and as the network failure and some other stumbling has showed, we are not perfect. We keep on improving quality, customer experience and affordability of our services to you all.
You customers actually do the testimony and proof in practise that our concept and offering is best in the country: from the articles below (official figures from NTA) you can see that August-October we have got 70% of all new subscribers in Nepal. We have gained some 14 market share percent units increase in two years to make us neck to neck in ALL telephone services (GSM, CDMA, PSTN) with NTC. At GSM, we gained market leadership already in March 2011. Among the internet users, Ncell has 59 per cent of the market followed by Nepal telecom with 38 per cent, with GPRS, ADSL, Dial-Up and CDMA services counted all together. According to reports, cable operators (Subisu, WorldLink etc.) have 3% of the internet market.
Thank You, you valued Ncell customer!
http://www.ekantipur.com/2011/11/26/business/number-of-mobile-phone-users-ever-surging/344462.html
http://thehimalayantimes.com/fullNews.php?headline=Mobile+users+growing+by+10+people+per+day&NewsID=311137
