Mitra dares telecom firms to bill clients by ‘pulse’

Telecommunications firms in the country have been challenged by a lawmaker to provide a pro-consumer per-six second billing system to their clients instead of engaging in a third generation (3G) war. 3G is a new mobile phone service which allows video phone calls. Rep. Abraham Mitra (2-D, Palawan) said cellular phone service providers should be racing as to who can give a per-second billing system to their customers first. ‘This is the kind of competition the public would like to see. The phone company that can price voice calls on a per six-second cycle instead of per minute gets the prize in terms of more patronage," he said. Mitra said that while local phone companies are scrambling to offer 3G to a market dubbed as the texting capital of the world, the billing systems remain “old tech." “That’s the irony. They have the technology that will allow you to see who you are calling to on the other side of the world, but they claim not to have the means to cut up your phone charge into seconds," Mitra said. He said a company that has offered to remit dollars from abroad through “text" can certainly know how to “micromeasure" phone calls. The lawmaker said he finds it hard to believe that phone companies who offer ring tones of King Kong growling is technologically inadequate to meter a call by the second. Mitra scored current billing practices of mobile phone service providers as “anti-consumer." Local mobile phone users are being billed by the minute when the international norm is to bill them per “pulse," or for every six seconds. At present, call durations are rounded off to the nearest minute so that a call that lasts for 1 minute and 6 seconds is billed as a two-minute call. Mitra said consumers are billed billions of pesos for “phantom call minutes" annually. “The pay-per-use principle, while it applies to all goods, does not apply to mobile phone calls," he said. “When we buy gasoline, it is measured up to the centiliter. We buy medicine by the milligram. But when it comes to phone calls, why is it automatically rounded off to the next minute?" he said. He urged the National Telecommunications Commission to uphold consumer interest by ordering telephone companies to bill mobile phone calls on a per pulse basis. Earlier, Rep. Alan Peter Cayetano (Taguig-Pateros), revealed that 15 to 25 billion pesos of income of the government lost when NTC allowed mobile phone companies to used 3G technology without the proper bidding. “The NTC totally disregarded the interest of the government and welfare of the Filipino. It is time to stop the railroading and disregarding of the bidding process (especially in the case of 3G) as well as in tolerating the cartel like attitude of some telecommunications companies," Cayetano said. Cayetano has filled House Resolution 1105 urging the appropriate committee to investigate the controversy surrounding the 3G and the NTC. -GMANEWS.TV