At last, a House Bill has been presented to protect the cellphone service subscribers in the Philippines. At some point in time, almost everyone of us lost some prepaid balance due to rampant and deceptive “free” offers of telcos which then charges the user after a while. This technique catches lots of fishes because of their free offers that were designed to be a pretty nice deal. But it wasn’t.
The author of House Bill 6335 is Marinduque Representative Lord Allan Jay Velasco. He said that telcos should issue a daily report on the number of calls and text messages made, average call length, the summary of each call and text messages sent, and of course – the total cost due for the day. This daily customer billing support was suggested to be available on both prepaid and postpaid subscribers.
Here are some of the statements made by Rep. Velasco.
“In doing so, this will protect the welfare of each end-user as consumers and shield them from deceptive, unfair and unconscionable acts and practices”
“The State also recognizes the need to protect the welfare of each end-user as consumers, shield them from deceptive, unfair and unconscionable acts and practices, provide information and education to facilitate sound choices and the proper exercise of rights by the consumers,” Velasco said.
If any cellular service provider violates the proposed act, they will be fined with an amount of Php500,000 for the first offense, Php1 million for the second offense, and Php1.5 million for the third offense. This will be regulated and implemented by the Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC).
This proposal seems to be a very good idea. This way, people will have access to their usage statistics and discrepancies will be easier to detect if ever something ( ex. lost load balance) happened. I hope our cellular service providers will not be against this proposal so that we can all monitor our usage even we are prepaid subscribers.
[ Source: Congress.gov.ph ]