Why Aircel should be brought to books for sloppy services?

Beleaguered Aircel has finally filed for bankruptcy with the National Company Law Tribunal. But much before that, the company drew flak from its subscribers owing to its sloppy networks. Customers using Aircel services were faced with network issues for quite long and their problems increased when GTL Infrastructure closed nearly one-third of the total tower on account of pending dues.

At the same time, telecom service providers such as Vodafone and Idea also turned off interconnection on account of non-payment of dues.

In fact, Aircel was unable to address the rising porting requests because of its capacity constraints.

Long before its filling of bankruptcy, some of the tweets with hastag Aircel said:

“Anyway to port out of Aircel without port out code? You are going to lose the loyal customer since 2005! Shame on guys doing irritating thing”

“How on earth do these companies sponsor IPL teams paying such huge sums of money, when they can’t afford to serve the people? “

“All over Tamil Nadu, Aircel smartly turned off signal stations to avoid its customers from porting not even getting a single point of signal to send port out SMS”

“Dear Trai, millions of Aircel consumer need your help…just do something so that we can port out number, everything is linked with OTP. Please do something how can anyone just go away like this?”

The Aircel case has triggered one more debate-- is it okay to leave a company which troubled it subscribers with its poor network for a long tenure? Why can’t telecom regulator or the government intervene in such cases?

Keeping in mind the fact that telecom services are gradually turning out to be a utility these days, so isn’t it the onus lies with the government to curtail certain companies who are providing sloppy services at a time when the government showing its concern over call drops and quality of services?

Companies like Aircel should be brought to book to make the industry cautious about their services and safeguard the interest of the subscribers.