Telephony charges need more transparency

This article appears today in the Irish regional newspapers of INM.

By Michael Commane
In 1975 I helped install a telephone exchange in the Dominican Priory in Rome. It was a second-hand cross bar exchange. Mechanical bits and bobs jumping and moving all around the place. And it was big.

Back then it was not possible to telephone Ireland directly from Rome. Another world, another time.

When my family got a telephone in the early 1960s in Dublin it was a big thing and just some short years before that there were still single digit telephone numbers.

When phones first appeared in trains, people queued up to call those collecting them that the train was either on time or late. A phone in a train now seems and sounds antiquated.

I imagine over 90 per cent of people who read this column have a mobile phone.

It really has been an extraordinary story of technological progress.

Last October I bought a smart phone – an Iphone. It was a quantum leap for me as before that I had an ancient thing that no young person would be seen dead with.

The Iphone is mind-boggling. I can use it as a telephone, a camera, internet facility.

I can download applications, commonly called apps. These magical ‘things’ allow me listen to any radio station anywhere in the world, watch TV stations. I have Dublin bus timetables on it. It has is a satellite navigational system. This machine is ‘scary’. It is pure magic.

Not so long ago at all I was mesmerised, maybe annoyed, to see people surfing the net on their smart phones on the Luas. No, I’m not doing it, but I understand now. It’s addictive.

But, and there is always a ‘but’ in this valley of tears of ours. And the ‘but’ has of course to do with how telephone companies must be making an awful lot of money on us and do we actually know how much we are spending.

When I changed over from an ‘old-fashioned’, ‘conventional’ mobile phone to the IPhone I knew it would cost more to use. I was a prepaid customer and decided to stay in that category but upped my monthly payment from €20 to €30. Along with the normal telephony deal it gave me 250 megabytes usage of data each month. I quickly discovered that that was not adequate. I decided to change to bill pay and for the same price I was told I would receive monthly one gigabyte of data. So I changed over

I did the change over via the telephone and was told it would take three to five working days. It took over a week and in the meantime I was charged a punitive rate for accessing data.

When my package did change over the telephone company forgot to add the data bundle.

Every day for six days I called customer service. It was a head-wrecking experience of pressing buttons, listening to voice prompt, eventually getting through to a human voice. I have given my address, telephone number and date of birth in those five days a zillion times. I feel far older than on the first occasion I gave my date of birth.

Eventually everything seems to be in place and the telephone company has ‘credited’ my account for data usage during the interim period.

How many people are so careful or parsimonious enough to keep on top of all this?

Some weeks ago I wrote in this column a review of Hans Fallada’s 'Alone in Berlin'. Since then I have read more of his novels, including 'Little Man, What Now'. It is a critique of what life is like for the small, unimportant people, especially in times of difficulty.

The dice is always stacked against the poor and fragile in our society. To say anything else is humbug, a type of pseudo jargon fed to us from the ruling classes.

And on that point I have to admit these days I keep saying to myself that there will hardly be a priest in the land, who will know the first thing about the current recession that is sweeping the country. How can anyone empathise with the poor and fragile if they never have a chance of knowing what it means to be anxious and worried about where the money for telephone and electricity bills is to come from?

Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn comments in 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' that a man who is warm can never understand a man who is cold.

I could not begin to tell you the level of frustration I reached in my communication with the telephone company.

What must it be like for people who are constantly being pilloried and feel alienated, lost and angry, people who simply are not cheeky or articulate enough with their case?

Technology is great but the price of it needs always to be transparent, customer friendly and properly regulated.

After all, communications is about understanding and empathising with other people.

Isn't it ironic, with all our instant messaging, so many are so alienated.

A funny old world.