[Resolved]  Uninor — Activation and charging of services without my approval

Address:

Alappuzha, Kerala

I am a user of the services of the mobile telephony service provider under discussion and my number is [protected] and readers of this review are free to check up on me if they want to verify my complaint here ( I intend to discontinue Uninor shortly and so in case anyone wants to check the veracity of this review, they are requested to do so in a short time.)

I belong to a mid sized town in Kerala called Mavelikara where almost all the cellular phone providers have an excellent coverage. Uninor started its operation in our town along with Tata Docomo in October 2009. I took my connection in December 2009.

In the initial phase of my usage o[censored]ninor, the main problem was lack of coverage. The coverage was extremely poor with Uninor unfairly charging its customers to built the infrastructure. This should be noted by people in Mumbai where Uninor is planning to start operations soon. Irrespective of the discounts offered to the customers, they would still be short changed since the coverage is virtually non existent or inadequate.This causes frequent droppage of calls in the first minute itself, where a set up charge is involved. Redialling the same number, means an additional call set charge. This works in advantage o[censored]ninor, since the more call drops in the first minute, the more they will be able to levy a set up charge from you.As a result you end up losing money inspite of all the discounts they give you to lure you. They use your money to build up their infrastructure. And if you call up Customer Care Center, they very sweetly tell youthat they are new and have infrastructural problems which they cannot do anything.

And now eight months down the line, while quality of calls have improved significantly, Uninor has started resorting to devious methods to fleece the customers of their money. A few days back, I received an SMS from them saying that " My Tunes" has been activated on my phone and noticed that Rs.40 had been debited from my account. I never subscribed to this service nor has anyone asked my permission to do so. Just like that Uninor thought that I needed the services and unilaterally took the decision o do so. I called up Customer Service to bring this to their notice and claim a refund. I was told that their systems are down and that they couldn’t do anything to help me. I was advised to call in the next day which I did and I was given the same answer. On the third day however, their systems were alright and they took my complaint, gave me a service request number (SR 1 [protected]) and assured me resolution within 72 hours. And the strangest part is that 72 hours for Uninor means 9 days since they say that they calculate the 72 hours based on their working hours for 9 am to 5 pm. This means that I have to wait for 12 days ( 3 days system down and 9 days for them to act) before this issue of stealing from me is resolved, if at all it will be. What a company highway robbers.


My advise to all those people who are planning to take a Uninor connection is " please dont ". I have used the services of various providers- BSNL, Airtel, Idea and Vodafone at various points of time. I also have used the services of T-Mobile and Verizon during my stay in the US. And comparing the two, I have a lot of complaints against providers in India and feel that they take the Indian customer for granted and shot changes him in many ways. Basically, these Indian providers are of 2 types- the first type has excellent call quality but they dupe the customers on the billing which is not transparent. The second type has reasonably transparent billing processes but suffer from attrocious coverage and hence poor call quality. However, UNINOR leads the lot in that they have poor call quality and also devious and deceptive billing processes which fleece the customer.