Sometimes explanation offered is too ridiculous and inaccurate. I invite customers to add up their sufferings here so that we can form a group and give representation to the TRAI. Here are the points I have realised.

Promise made by providers

Every provider makes a promise in 3G spectrum that speed will be 3+MBPS. But in actual practice it varies from 0 to 1500 KBPS. Not a single one keeps the promise of supplying the magic 3 MBPS.

Whenever I used to send mails to the customer care, the subject was avoided carefully citing other reasons. The customer help call centre executive will try to confuse you more and finally will pass the buck by registering the complaints. On one occasion, the service provider disconnected me permanently.

I used Beetel Dongle. On a visit when I asked them to prove that my device supported 3 mbps speed, they commented that the dongle was not GPRS enabled. So I purchased the dongle from the shop itself and inserted the sim. Unfortunately I did not carry my laptop so first I was told that there is no computer available to demo the speed. Fortunately a customer had brought a laptop and I inserted it to see the speed and got the same result. So the intelligent salesman trying to confuse me  said a golden word. Now it is coming at low speed but eventually it will pick up. When cornered by us he admitted that it will never pick up due to tower problem.

This is a breach of contract. They are taking money from us to provide a 3G connection. When they cannot provide they should either refund or reduce the bills. They do neither. TRAI is keeping silent in this regard, as they are happy in getting the spectrum money without caring for customers' benefit. I am mulling to file a PIL.

Stopping of unlimited scheme

To rob people and to collect maximum revenues, most of the service providers have withdrawn this service. It used to help us to keep a tag on the budget, especially of us retired persons. Here also TRAI failed to look into the benefits of onsumers.

Why bills are so high

- Certain email providers are providing advertisement at the side of the mails which goes on changing. It consumes bites as well.

- There is a back ground scenery changing frequently. They consume maximum bites.

- News sites to gain income set up advertisements and pop ups. It is so far so good for them but is a punishment for us. We have to pay for the bites for those advertisements, which we don't want to see. Again when we are scrolling through news sites, every time we change pages it consumes a lot of bites. In one case before the site opens I have already consumed 1MBPS without even been able to view a single word.

- Therefore, we need to be careful. We should not open those news sites at all. Instead we should buy newspapers. It is cheaper. For every MB we pay 10 paise. Almost all newspapers have a minimum 10 pages. If we read all of them we land up here itself to 5 Rs plus we pay for the pop up and moving advertisement in the pages.

- Video, YouTube, online cinema and chats consume huge amount of bites.

Previously, a message would pop up showing the bites consumed and left at the closing of a session, which was quite helpful, but this has been discontinued and replaced with a SMS service. Now we have to remove the SIM card and insert it into the phone and send an sms to know our balance.