Director

Dear Team,

This complaint is against Airtel for my connection number 9871883339 for billing discrepancy.
I sent New year greeting text message to my contact list on 1st Jan 10.22 pm and 2nd Jan (which would be close to 200 contacts sent in 4-5 batches). On 2nd Jan, throughout the day i kept on receiving calls from my contacts that they have received my whole message more than 5 times. Some of them even received it 30 times. I thought this must be a system bug which generally occurs on such occasions like New Year or Festivals when the traffic is high. Obviously a customer is not supposed to pay for such issues which happen at the service provider’s end.

But to my surprise i received a message on 13th Jan that my usage has reached Rs 8672 which exceeds my credit limit and hence my outgoing services are barred. I called the Customer care (which as expected is always rude), after lot of efforts got to know that it is due to SMS charges which are approx Rs 6300. If we look at my last 7-8 years usage, for which i have been your customer, my usage has never even been closer to this. The average bill i have paid in last few years is not more than Rs 1000. I have been trying to raise this (through calls and mails) for last ten days and all i got to hear from your team was that since your account statement has not been generated yet we can not help. And then i was left with no other option but to wait till 22nd Jan when my statement gets generated. I received the statement today and called the nodal office for resolution. And the explanation i got from the executive named Mamta is that:
Any message which is for more than 160 characters is automatically converted to MMS and hence MMS charges of Rs 5 per message is levied.
On my question of why it has been sent multiple times, i got a funny reply that an MMS if delivered to a non smart phone would be split in 2-3 parts and then will be delivered. And hence all the charges are valid.
I do not buy any of the illogical explanations because of following reasons:

The same message when sent on 1st January at 10.21 pm is charged at normal (SMS) rate of Re 1 per msg and when sent on 2nd Jan, same message without any addition or deletion of characters is charged at Rs 5 per msg (MMS rate). This can be very well verified from the statement. I fail to understand why different rates are charged on different occassions.
Regarding the Non smart phone reasoning : Most of my contacts have smart phones but still if i assume that 10% are non smart phone users, they received complete message more than 5 times (not the parts but complete message multiple times). Rest as per your logic should have received it only once but i have thoroughly analysed my bill and even the smart phone users have received the complete message some 10 times. I have examples to prove this, if you would want to validate at your end i will share the numbers of the contacts who have smart phones but have received the messages 10 times. I randomly checked some 8 – 10 numbers which have been charged 10 times at the MMS charges.
Also the message has been sent to email ids of some contacts that too 10 times which is out of my understanding why was the message sent to the email id’s. I never chose ids while sending the message.
So if despite all relevant examples/my observations if you still think that the charges levied are correct and valid i would tend to believe this as a Fraud. I am in any case not going to accept these charges and would take this up in the Consumer Forum with TRAI authorities. As is i am so frustrated by your customer care services and this episode has definitely left me with a bitter taste.

Thanks