As the government boasted on Tuesday that mobile operators have started to reduce their SMS or text rates as a result of a circular issued by the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC), a
consumer group criticized the agency as incapable of enforcing its own order after noting that local carriers have not yet implemented the said circular.
The NTC has announced that starting Nov. 30, SMS rates will go down to 80 centavos from P1 per text as the country’s three telecommunications companies (Globe, Smart, and Sun Cellular) comply with its earlier order to reduce access charges for text messaging service.
But according to TXTmate, a non-profit organization whose majority of the members are purportedly from the University of the Philippines, said the reduced interconnection rate for SMS was a failure even as it took the NTC “three years to actually implement” it.
“And yet even now, on the day of its promised implementation, consumers are complaining that telecoms are refusing to reduce the cost of SMS,” the group said in a statement.
TXTmate said its members tested the promised implementation but came up with similar results: most of them said that the cost was still P1.00 per SMS, while others claimed that, after checking, the cost was P0.95 per SMS.
This was a far cry from NTC’s promised reduction to P0.80, the group said.
TXTmate president Marcelino Veloso III observed that “If the NTC is unable to effectively implement the simplest of directives (one which took them three years to materialize), how can we expect it to tackle bigger issues? Already we see numerous complaints for mobile internet overcharging and the continuous lack of permanent 6-second pulse billing. In some countries, we can call this daylight robbery. Here, it is a way of life.”
He noted that even pro-competition rules such as Reference Access Offers (RAOs), with implementing rules in 2009, and Significant Market Power (SMP) rules, which were proposed as early as 2007, have been promised but have yet to be delivered by the telecom regulator.
“With this background, does anyone really expect the NTC to actually implement the SMS interconnection reduction in the near future? How much more reducing the same fees for voice calls anytime soon?” he asked
Veloso claimed that the problem is exacerbated by the approval of the PLDT-Digitel deal which was done “with barely a slap on the wrist.”
He noted that in the United States, the AT&T/T-Mobile deal appears to be falling apart because of pressure by the US Department of Justice and its telecom regulator.
“Here, it is the other way around. The NTC is the piñata of the telecom giants,” Veloso remarked.
He added: “If the NTC was unable to effectively regulate the industry with three players, how can it expect to do so now when we have a duopoly which can easily delay regulations? If it takes three years to implement a regulation that doesn’t even appear to be working, how long will we wait for the more important pro-competition, pro-consumer rules?
