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]