Mobile woes: They didn't activate the service for 2 months!

Everyone loves to hate their mobile service providers. On January 4, we carried A Ganesh Nadar's account of his cellphone connection going from bad to worse while on tour and asked readers to share similar experiences with us. Here, Anirban Ghosh tells his story:

Here's my experience with Vodafone. I was on an international trip and decided to avail of the International Roaming SMS service. Although I would not be able to make calls home, having my SMS service activated would mean I could text my near and dear ones anytime.

In the past, I had availed of such a service from Hutch without any problem. A few hours prior to flying I rang up the customer care at Vodafone to be told that I needed to place the request just an hour before my flight took off. I did so and was assured that I would be able to send and receive SMSes upon reaching the foreign country (in Europe).

That never happened. I had my brother in India call up Vodafone a number of times. Each time they gave different excuses like 'it takes a while to be activated' etc but throughout my 2 month long trip I never got my SMS activated.

On coming back to India I was handed a bill for two months' rental. There was no call or any SMS but I was just told to pay the monthly rental for two months. Vodafone had a policy that a customer could deactivate a postpaid number for a maximum of 2-3 months without losing the number. 'Deactivation' would ensure there would be no rental to pay for.

I took this point up with Vodafone and argued that had I been told my international roaming SMS would never be activated, I would have deactivated my number for 2 months prior to leaving India. I only kept it active so that I could avail of the SMS service. I refused to pay the rental for the two months on these grounds. Yes, there were mails and letters to be sent but in the end they could not force me to pay even though they cut my connection.

Have you had a nasty cellphone service experience? Share your mobile woes with us. Write in to us at getahead@rediff.co.in (subject line: 'Mobile woes') and we'll feature your story, right here on rediff.com

And here is reader Abhijit Gangurde's account:

I was an Airtel customer when their Internet facility was really cheap. It was really good for students, to access the Internet via a mobile phone rather than going to a cybercafe.

Everything was going good until one day I faced a problem -- while connecting to the ISP (Internet service provider) it was showing an error -- 'connection failed'. Sometime later it managed to connect, but the Internet wasn't working. I then changed the handset (though it had 3G-support) and tried, but again same thing happened.

Then I called customer care and told them about the problem. They cut the call, saying that my handset was causing the trouble. Actually it was the service provider's problem. The tower which gives the GPRS range wasn't working (I knew because I am an engineering student).

The same thing happened to my friends also. Rental was being charged for the service, but we weren't getting the facility. Then we all decided to complain to the local Airtel office, stating that customer care couldn't solve our problem. They gave us a hotline number to try out and didn't accept our written complaint. Again, we got the same answer -- that the handset was causing the problem, or that there was a low balance left, blah blah...

We tried 2-3 times after that to give a written complaint to the local office, but they didn't accept it. For nearly 3-4 months we fought, but finally we surrendered.