After a traumatising period of blackberry services black out, last week, users all over the world have been asking for compensation for the pains of not connecting to loved ones and business associates.
Ironically, all the demands have always gone to the operators who offer the blackberry services on their mobile platform, leaving real service providers, Research In Motion, RIM with very little to worry about.
While many operators have shanked the responsibility of compensation, a lot of operators from different countries of the world including the United States of America, South Africa and Qatar among others, have agreed on one form of compensation or the other, to assuage the frail nerves of their subscribers who mainly subscribe to the Blackberry services using their mobile lines.
This has left a lot of Nigerian subscribers wishing they could be part of these lot. However, Hi-Tech can authoritatively reveal that the wishes of such subscribers, especially those of Airtel Nigeria, have come to reality.
This is as the operator has agreed to compensate its blackberry users after the global. According to Airtel, its BlackBerry customers would be offered a service waiver following last week’s global outage even though the fault was attributed to the service provider, Research in Motion (RIM).
However, RIM has now fully restored data services to its BlackBerry devices. The BlackBerry outage was caused by a hardware error which halted messaging and Web browsing across many parts of the world, disrupting services for 3 days. The disruptions began in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India early in the week and later spread to North America.
Airtel Nigeria’s Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director Mr. Rajan Swaroop, while announcing the compensation to Hi-Tech, said that “we remain concerned about the inconvenience this has caused to all our BlackBerry users earlier this week and we would like to compensate both our pre paid and post paid customers for the inconvenience as best we can. “For our pre paid customers, we will extend the subscription of the services for the month of October by three days. We are communicating this to the affected customers through SMS.”
Swaroop also added that, “for our Post Paid customers, who are customers paying their bills at the end of every month, we will waive three days off the BlackBerry monthly rental for the month of October. The three day waiver will be reflected in the monthly bill sent to all our post paid BlackBerry users for the month of October.”
Airtel clarified that although the root cause emanated from the global provider of the services, the telco service provider was willing to offer the extension as a token compensation for its customers.
Meanwhile, last week, South Africa’s National Consumer Commissioner, Mamodupi Mohlala, had sparked off the compensation campaign, encouraged consumers to seek compensation from the National Consumer Commission, saying BlackBerry users would be protected under the Consumer Protection Act.
Mahlahla was reported to have told consumers that they may even return their BlackBerry phones and exchange them for a different brand. For her, all parties involved in the value chain could be held liable in terms of section 61 of the act.
But by Weekend, Vodacom SA said it was not liable for the BlackBerry blackout which hit the smatphone’s users in five continents and over a million Vodacom BlackBerry users in SA.
The telco’s Corporate Affairs Chief Officer, Portia Maurice, reportedly told consumers that RIM’s technical problems were out of Vodacom’s control.
However, Vodacom alongside other South Africa’s major network providers offered customers airtime and SMSes, while they stress that their offer is a token of goodwill as the BlackBerry’s blackout was out of their control.
MTN SA was also at the weekend reported to have agreed to credit its BlackBerry Internet and BlackBerry Enterprise Services users with ten South African Rands (R10).
Vodacom said it will be giving all its BlackBerry users who were affected by the service disruption twenty free Vodacom to Vodacom minutes and twenty free SMSes from Monday to Friday this week as a token of goodwill and a gesture of appreciation for their patience.
It however warned, “we will not be able to do this each time a supplier has a problem, but we do believe this is an exception.” Cell C offered their customers a R10 discount from the R60 internet service fee and ten free SMSes and Virgin Mobile offered R50 airtime to affected users.
In a related development, Qatar’s BlackBerry customers of both Qtel and Vodafone were also promised compensation at the weekend with three days credit for the hassle they experienced during the outages.
Qtel offers direct compensation for its customers with three days credit for Hala and Shahry BlackBerry users which will be automatically added to their accounts
Hala customers will receive the credit automatically to their account, while Shahry customers will have three days credit added to their next monthly bill.
Like others, Qtel also said that “although the service issues were beyond its control, it has taken the decision to offer compensation as part of its commitment to full customer service”.
Vodafone Qatar also said in a statement that they would be providing BlackBerry customers with three days of free services, adding that “our BlackBerry customers will receive three days of BlackBerry service credit by October 20, and will receive an SMS once the BlackBerry service credit has been added to their accounts,” it said.
Vodafone also advised customers to reset their Blackberry handsets by removing then re_inserting the battery if they continue to experience problems.