BAYAN Muna party-list Representative Teddy Casiño urged the House of Representatives to immediately pass House Bill 5653, or the Mobile Phone Subscribers bill, to protect the rights of mobile phone subscribers.
Casiño said mobile phone companies now owe their subscribers P3 billion from failing to lower interconnection charges as ordered by the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) last November.
House Bill 5653 seeks to promote the rights of mobile phone subscribers by regulating prices, requiring telecommunications service companies to provide detailed billing of both prepaid credits and postpaid consumption, number portability, lowered pulse rate and other service improvements for the benefit of the consuming public.
Casiño said among the numerous instances where these telecommunication service providers (telcos) defied NTC was when they refused to implement a 20-centavos deduction on interconnection charges for SMS (text messages) which the NTC ordered effective on November 30, 2011.
“The true costs of mobile phone services are hidden in the untransparent pricing of Smart and Globe, which enables them to impose onerous charges. Prepaid subscribers often are left blind as to how their credits were consumed, if they were indeed consumed at all, prior to the load expiration, which in itself is a dubious practice,” he said.
He claimed that postpaid subscribers also bewail a lack of transparency on the charges levied against them as found in billing statements.
“These issues, among others, have to be addressed and it has to be done now,” Casiño said.
He claimed that to date, an estimate of almost P3 billion have yet to be refunded by the telcos to their subscribers due to unauthorized text charges.
Casiño said this data is extrapolated from the latest financial reports provided by the telcos themselves, which reveal a gross income of at least P200 million per day from text messaging services.
“Assuming that half of the text messages are between telcos and subject to interconnection fees, the 20-centavo reduction in said fees would mean the telcos have been overcharging their consumers by P20 million per day, or a total of P3 billion, for the four and a half months that the NTC order remains unimplemented,” he said.
He, however, said this is a conservative estimate considering the fact that as text capital of the world, some 1.5 to 1.8 billion text messages a day are sent in the Philippines.
“In some of our computations, the overprice even reached five times this amount," Casiño added.
To my countryman wake up! Do something men... I definitely vote for this Bill. What is in your mind now?
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