Over the weekend, West Australian Vodafone customers were left stranded without mobile coverage for 11 hours thanks to a network outage. Vodafone updated their website to inform customers of the issue – well those who had internet access anyway – but it raises the question: What should happen when a telco doesn’t deliver their service sufficiently?
If you spend any time on Twitter, you’ve probably seen a recent surge of people shouting in 140 characters or less that they are unimpressed by their mobile service situation. And the obvious response is that we live in a country with multiple mobile network operators, so it’s a users prerogative to switch networks.
But what happens when the service you pay for isn’t being delivered? Given that every major telco has exorbitant fees for customers breaking contract, is it unreasonable to expect that the Telcos be forced to pony up compensation when they fail to deliver the service they are paid for?
Apparently Vodafone will be looking at compensation for affected customers from Saturday’s service outage in Perth on a case by case basis. But is that enough? Should there be a system in place for customers rights for when this sort of thing goes down? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
[via iTechReport]
Corteks
Monday, December 13, 2010 at 2:47 PM11 hours?! Mine only went out for about 3. Luckily during that time the only inconvenience for me was not being able to try out the navigator function I noticed is now on my HTC’s google maps.
Jason
Monday, December 13, 2010 at 2:48 PMTwo choices, vote with your feet/dollars or enforce the service level agreement that you have in place.
When you think about it, lets take a nominal phone bill of $50 per month. It doesn’t matter if it goes to $100. This $50 equates to about $0.07 per hour (720 hours in a 30 day month). So if you’re out for 11 hours, that’s a $0.77 refund.
For those that claim they’ve lost money, it costs $0.07 per hour to have a second phone on another provider. At that rate you’d have to be an idiot to not have another phone and still complain :)
Me, if my phone isn’t working, I’m a happy chappy :P
Richard Djordjevic
Monday, December 13, 2010 at 5:27 PMExcept that people can’t contact you because you have to use a different number, and that to preempt the downtime you are forced to own and carry two mobiles.
Also people don’t pay to use a phone on a per an hour basis like you seem to equate it to. They pay to use it when they need to. Compensation in the manner you describe would be an insult to users and a joke.
Lastly not everyone has expendable incomes and wants to pay twice just to ensure that they can provide a solution to a telcos problem. It shouldn’t fall on the consumer to fix the situation in the manner you outline…people don’t install multiple internet connections outside of a corporate environment just in case their broadband goes down, so why should they pay for two phone contracts?
Richard Djordjevic
Monday, December 13, 2010 at 5:30 PMOhh and also, lost money complaints in many cases will also be above and beyond the phone service itself. Anyone that relies on a phone to contact customers would be effected if they or their client were with vodafone during the downtime. Even if the call plan loss was $0.07, which I still think is a ludicrous way to summarise it, the lost money could be in the hundreds or thousands based on what those missed calls were about.
David Shears
Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at 12:16 AMHaving worked in the Telecommunications Industry for more than 10 years now I have one piece of advice; if you have a mobile/phone/internet service of a critical nature, be it you use it for work or running your business don’t ever sign up for a residential or consumer grade service.
Telco’s write it into their agreements that any losses you have when you lose service is not the liability of the service provider. This extends to the ACCC which does not consider mobile and internet (and mobile internet) as essential services. What this means is that all refunds and/or credits are applied solely at the discretion of the service provider. You can of course bring the matter to the TIO but this can be a long and drawn out process which will no doubt waste more of your time and money. In most cases business customers who seek losses on consumer service are returned but a fraction of actual losses
Most business service (including SOHO) have very specific service level agreements in place that will not only make the provider your with ensure that your service is treated critical but will also allow for a greater service guarantee refund if you are left without service for an extended period of time.
Richard Djordjevic
Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at 4:29 PMYeah thats fair enough…I wouldn’t if I was a business either. I’m not in WA so I wasn’t affected. I was just responding to the fact that the downtime costs for many people likely wasn’t just 30 cents or whatever the OP wanted to paint it as. I don’t propose they get compensated if they lost a $10,000 contract because of it, but to say the loss is equal to the monthly rate divided into the hours the service was down is completely innacurate since it doesn’t factor in how people use the service or what for.
Tom
Monday, December 13, 2010 at 2:52 PMahhh damn you Vodafone, my Wife couldn’t get hold of me to let me know I needed grab some more milk!!
Risto
Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at 6:14 PMTom here sound just like Tom R. (the bloke who won the HP…heheh)
Your Mate Alex
Monday, December 13, 2010 at 2:55 PMAlthough it says I should be within 3g coverage on their maps, my whole area is an optus 3g black-spot. Unfortunately in August I signed to a 12 month contract just before moving to this house. I haven’t bothered calling them as I figure they can’t do anything any way. Am I screwed until next August? Anyone with some some constructive advice (or feel free to call me an idiot for signing with optus again)? If I had the choice, I’d be on telstra in a heartbeat.
James
Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at 8:56 AMOptus will actually let you break contract with no penalties if you can’t get reception in your area. Give their customer service a call :)
johnd
Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at 11:20 AMActually, the ACCC makes Optus let you out of your contract penalty-free. If it were up to Optus, they would continue to sting you while providing you with no service.
Your Mate Alex
Monday, December 13, 2010 at 3:02 PMsorry. in answer to the thread, there should be a special case cancellation policy. If the provider can’t provide the service, they should allow immediate exit from the contract with no contract cancellation fees, just the price of the phone multiplied by the proportion of months still left to go on your contract. ie. if your phone is worth $1000 and you are 12 months into a 24 month contract, $500 should be your exit from your contract. nothing else.
Ads
Monday, December 13, 2010 at 3:45 PMThat basically is the ETC for subsidised hardware, it is only more if you get your phone independant of your plan..
nick
Monday, December 13, 2010 at 3:03 PMThey need a good kick up the arse, why should i be paying for a service which they cant deliver properly,I will include TPG in this at the moment too,Ill be going to Telstra for my mobile contract when my Vodafone contract finishes.I would like to see compensation across the board.
Tomas Medina
Monday, December 13, 2010 at 3:12 PMUsers should automatically be switched onto full access coverage with another available and comparable carrier, at the original carrier’s expense. Any calls or usage made should continue to be charged at the normal rate.
Same thing should happen if the carrier’s too dang lazy to provide coverage in a fairly populous area
Tom
Monday, December 13, 2010 at 5:10 PMYeah, I’d agree with this notion. Coverage for your customers in outages should be the number one priority
G
Monday, December 13, 2010 at 3:16 PMvodafone in general need to be investigated. they are getting worse. to be honest i would suspect this “outage” was planned and – part of the upgrade process, but they don’t want to advertise it.
same thing as all the issues with voda going on but they refuse to admit it – however in new zealand they have same issues and admit it… come on…
as soon as i can afford a new phone that is compatible with NextG i’m jumpin ship. why why why oh why did i buy a legend with voda spectrum?
Benjibuls
Monday, December 13, 2010 at 3:33 PMCredit them with the equivalent call time I think would be nice. It’d be a bugger if you were in an emergency or having a baby. Failover to another network would be another option.
Ads
Monday, December 13, 2010 at 4:18 PM000/112 would still work..
Jamie
Monday, December 13, 2010 at 4:57 PMActually they didn’t. Tried them when the service outage was in effect and the emergency numbers failed also. So could potentially have been disastrous for some.
Richard Djordjevic
Monday, December 13, 2010 at 5:35 PMNo, I think people need more than the call time. They should get a percentage off their next bill.
Call time is useless to many of todays customers given so many people are on cap plans nowdays and therefore already have more minutes than they know they will ever use. I’ve had Vodafone try and offer that in the past as a solution and I told them it wasn’t compensation at all given I have no intention of using my current quota anyway to it’s full, instead pushed for a reduced bill and got that.
Usually in a month I might be lucky to make $50 in calls from my $600 quota…I chose the plan for the data allowance.
Cameron
Monday, December 13, 2010 at 3:46 PMI think we’re starting to move into an age where mobiles are becoming more and more essential. It’s becoming expected that you’ll be contactable on your mobile most of the time and if your not contactable then something must be wrong. With this in mind I think it’s time for the communications authority to bring in some rules around basic levels of standards for these services.
In this case where it was the voda network down then they should have switched their customers over to another network for the duration of the outage. Arguments on if it’s technically or commercially possible at this stage is pretty pointless because it’s pretty much guaranteed not to be possible, but if it’s made to be an essential service then these kind of things will have to be sorted out.
David Shears
Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at 12:30 AMI agree Cameron, as more and more users move away from copper based telephony in favour of naked broadband services the need for reliable mobile coverage essential.
Of course playing devil’s advocate, outages will always occur, we have to expect that. Even a service that is guaranteed to work 99% of the time still means still allow of outages 3.65 days out of the year. Considering that most service outages are generally localised and are usually resolved within a day its pretty reassuring to consider that this is the biggest mobile service disruption that I can remember in recent history (in terms of volume and downtime anyway).
I think that most service providers will boast that their service uptime is typically at the 99.5% mark which is not bad in the scope of things.
That being said; call your service provider and see what they are willing to offer in order to make you less dissatisfied with the outage. I wouldn’t be surprised if their call centre staff was instructed to offer some kind of compensation if you contacted them about it. Its not usually much, but a discount is a discount after all.
M
Monday, December 13, 2010 at 3:47 PMPretty sure most Telco’s have clauses in contracts that if they can’t provide the service then the contract can be cancelled without any charges being laid for breaking the contract. ACCC basically says that it’s illegal to be charged for a service that nots provided, so should anyone have zero coveragef contact the TIO and they’ll get you out of it.
In my experience (work for a telco) most people who are unhappy about their coverage/contracts are too lazy to actually make an effort to cancel, they just want it done for them so they just pay it out instead of going through channels to get it rescinded.
Greg
Monday, December 13, 2010 at 4:26 PMI’m more surprised that anyone is still with Vodafone after the last few months of disservice, to be honest.
G
Monday, December 13, 2010 at 5:11 PM+1
i’m surprised that i’m still with them.
for me optus will be just as bad, so need to wait till new phone with telstra.
JWD
Monday, December 13, 2010 at 4:34 PMOn the other end of this sort of specturm, my brother and sister in law have Vodafone products (phones and mobile internet devices), they live in longwarry north – a place with fairly poor (i.e you have to wander around to try and get a single bar) reception, however on black saturday and all throughout those days they somehow managed to get full coverage right up until the disaster was declared over for their area. could somebody please explain that to me? and could you explain why they were accused of being liars over the phone when questioning the Vodafone staff?
vodafone are an all round shit company from all the experience i’ve had with them.
Kelly
Monday, December 13, 2010 at 4:38 PMCompensation? Seriously get over yourselves. Remember when there were no mobile phones. I think this truely shows just how dependant on technology our race has become, how sad that people can’t handle a few hours without their mobile able to make or receive a call.
Plus its a saturday, at least it wasn’t a bloody work day.
I walked into the perth city vodafone store with my boyfriend as he was worried he’d broken his phone (as he’d dropped it right before the outage) and the staff were friendly, apologetic and under alot of stress from a few big headed bullies too full of hot steam to let them explain for a moment what the situation was.
To all of you demanding compensation. Get over it. Its over and done with, and if you chose to lose your head about it rather than walk to a payphone as my boyfriend and I did (yes, they do still exist, and a large majority of the can sms too!!!) then thats a waste of your own time.
Tøe Hansen
Monday, December 13, 2010 at 7:28 PMThis is isn’t about whether or not we can go 11 hours without service. It’s about whether this is acceptable. I can easily go 11 hours without using or needing my phone, but it’s just not okay from the Telco when you’re paying for the service. As several people has suggested, I think everyone should be able to roam on other networks at the Telco’s expense, so the customers weren’t affected by the provider’s problems.
Richard Djordjevic
Monday, December 13, 2010 at 10:26 PMIt wasn’t a work day for you you mean, for others it may have been. What happens if you are a tradie on the road who needs to be able to make a call or what happens if someone is trying to call you, possibly because of an emergency. You can’t go to a pay phone if someone is trying to contact you and your phone is out either so thats a rather stupid solution…phones are designed for two way communication, not being able to receive calls may be a bigger issue than not being able to make them.
Brendan
Monday, December 13, 2010 at 4:42 PMFailing over to another provider and VHA wearing the cost for all calls during their network outage is a good place to start.
Dave Lord
Monday, December 13, 2010 at 5:02 PMIf the network is down they should provide instant roaming onto another carriers network. The technology exists, so why don’t they do it? If the carriers all had reciprocal agreements then the cost would be negligible, but there would be a lot more happy customers.
JNYBLK
Monday, December 13, 2010 at 5:02 PMEver since Vodafone joined with 3 then coverage is bad.
It’s like they just added the 3 clients to their network and did not update the network ;)
Dave
Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at 11:22 AMEx-Voda & 3 Mobile employee here.
VHA transitioned 3 clients over to the Vodafone network, but decided to keep the 850Mhz band. They continued to upgrade the Voda network, but stopped maintaining the 3 network.
But you’re right – they fell drastically behind in Voda maintenance while going at a cracking pace with the 3 customer transition. Now their main focus is network. They’re not able to compete with Telstra, but they’ve definitely got to pull their socks up. People buy on more than just value.
Iain Graham
Monday, December 13, 2010 at 5:03 PMI think that you’ll also find that the Customer Service Agreement that everyone automatically clicks “I Agree” to when they first start the mobile contract/service includes a clause that says that the telco is not liable for any losses due to downtime.
I can see Vodaphone pulling that out and waving it around. It’s pretty standard practice. And like Jason said above: Your lack of redundancy is your problem.
Anti
Monday, December 13, 2010 at 5:50 PMWhy don’t people ask the same question of trains running off time, or being cancelled?
simon c
Monday, December 13, 2010 at 8:08 PMI find the comments here interesting.
I would like to divert for just a moment and apply a similar level of thinking the “Cloud”. Who is to blame? Who is to cough up compensation? Which organisation is going to serve up fines if any are applicable?
When Gmail goes down and I require on that for my business (google apps) – does this mean I can get compensation for that? When Dropbox goes down do I get compensation? When Akamai breaks and stops serving my customers, who are buying my goods, do I make a claim for lost sales?
These comments, to me, show a level of entitlement that borders on embarrassment.
Things break, fail and misfire all the time. Murphy’s Law states that “if more than one person is responsible for a miscalculation, no one will be at fault”. Vodafone systems are a system that themselves are built on a another system. If the electricity goes out – Who is to blame? Voda? The power company? The electricity retailer or the sub-contractor paid to maintain the physical lines?
Giz.AU should do an article on “What do you think should happen when your internet/cloud breaks?”
Richard Djordjevic
Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at 4:37 PMAs someone alluded to before, there are business plans. While ultimatly I do feel the loses could be larger than the cost of the service, I also don’t feel you have to compansate based on any loss business. It should be a satisfactory compensation but based on what you are paying per a month.
In Gmails case there is a business plans you can go with under Google Apps that do have in the terms a guaranteed uptime of I believe 99.9% (http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html). For users on this who are paying for the service then yes, there should be compensation and given the nature of the account, probably a sizeable one too (these are the plans they are trying to get governments, schools and large businesses onto after all).
Likewise people paying for Voda should get some compensation. Not huge and not equal to the losses but I think a 5 to 10% deduction for a single bill if the user is proactive in asking for something seems satisfactory.
To answer your last question, the people to blame are those that you are dealing with directly, so yes, Voda will always be to blame for any services that go out. They are in charge of where they install services, who they use as an electricity company and who they contract so it is them who owe you the appology and whatever else. If the actual fault is with someone else then they should persue compensation or break a contract themselves internally, but the consumer shouldn’t have to deal with it. If I have a phone that fails under warranty I’ll send it back to the manufacturer and seller of the phone, not the company that produces the LCD panel for the phone company. Same deal here.
Owen
Monday, December 13, 2010 at 8:15 PMHey, Optus/virgin just had an outage in NSW. Not just a Voda issue
Brian
Monday, December 13, 2010 at 9:03 PMIts not so much the outages – in WA its the coverage, I live and work in Margaret River and the coverage map vs. reality must have been made with a paint program that has a Jackson Pollock icon. As soon as you get off the Bussel Highway you’re fried.
Jason
Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at 8:41 AMThere are merits to both Sides of the debate however I feel it draws such strong responses against vodafone because their performance on the whole is way behind the other telcos – and to make things worse the term customer service particularly over the phone is no applicable to Vodafone. However, other telcos exist – make the jump to Telstra I network problems are bothering you – their customer service staff don’t seem to have much of a clue but at least you’ll need to talk to them alot less.
Luke Colenso Brunsmann
Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at 9:17 AMEverything is fine in Queensland.. Although the Voda reception isnt that great at least it doesnt go out.
Bob W
Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at 4:43 PMWell, in response to some comments here.
I pay a business premium which covers a service.
If I don;t receive the service then I should receive compensation for that.
Vodafone have no problem getting every possible red cent from me when their service is available, and fair enough, they are a business. But I have abusiness as well and I object to paying for a service I haven’t received.
To expect everyone to have “redundancy” in every system is a ridiculous suggestion, and if that person truly does have two telco accounts, then they are just proving how essential these services are.
Vodafone are looking into compensation on a “case by case” basis. I would say that every Vodafone customer should state their case. By ignoring the outage you are accepting the level of service by default.
This was a major outage, it deserves a major customer response.