If you are an MTNL broadband subscriber, then you better take a back-up connection. Because they are just not reliable. My connection faced with a problem at the exchange. I contacted the call centre in the morning, and they said it would be fixed immediately. When nothing happened till afternoon, I called up the call centre again. They said MTNL employees had union elections in their offices so they would not work today. I called up the local exchange, a rude employee said he could’t help and banged the phone.
Even when MTNL is faced with severe competition from the private sector, the employees behaved like as if they still belonged to the old public sector-licence-quota-raj era.
Interestingly, only the call centre has been contracted out to the private sector. The rest – engineering and customer support – are still done by the MTNL employees. Here is the problem. They still belong to the PSU mindset and can’t care if the customer suffers. I was lucky that I had retained my Reliance data card connection (I will always keep this), so that I could work today.
Now the communications ministry is looking at merging BSNL and MTNL. That will not help. That will only make a smaller inefficient organisation roll into a much bigger in-efficient and highly unionised PSU.
Our request to Murasoli Dayanidhi Maran (telecom minister) and the UPA government: Privatise the hell out of MTNL and BSNL. Market will decide the rest.
Nikhil adds: I’m on an MTNL connection as well, and have had connectivity issues since the past couple of weeks. Today was the worst. According to the customercare executives, it seems that MTNL is upgrading its network to allow 2mbps capacity; it’s going take until the end of the week for the problems to be resolved. Of course, people on ‘unlimited’ and ‘night unlimited’ plans shall continue to have only 256kbps speed after the upgrade is done.
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