Saturday, December 09, 2006

A nuisance problem with Latvian Mobile Telephone

I've started my new job, but my mobile subscription is still on its way. My old employer had my Latvian Mobile Telephone (LMT) number blocked for outgoing calls since December 5. That sort of makes sense. From November 30 to December 4, the phone worked for calls on my account. Again, fair enough. Now the lack of outgoing service was getting to be a nuisance, so I bought an LMT O-Karte prepaid, slapped LVL 10 on it and thought I would forward all my incoming calls to the new number. Within the network, this is free of charge. However, I encountered the utter absurdity of being banned for using a free forwarding service because my outgoing service was suspended (this was confirmed by a service operator). Absolutely fucking absurd because 1) it costs neither me nor my old employer (who technically is the subscriber) anything 2) it is a major inconvenience that in no way benefits anyone nor prevents any exposure to financial risk, since there is none. It is simply a way of screwing the user for no reason.
To be fair, I don't know if the other operators Tele2 and Bite might do the same. But it would be equally pointless. Anyone "between service providers" would want to use this kind of arrangement, forwarding their number in transit to a temporary number and then back to normal when the old number was is effectively prevented from doing so. I blew the better part of LVL 2.50 on SMS to people announcing my temporary number instead of having their potential calls simply go seamlessly to the O-Karte number.
I am curious how mobile operators outside Latvia handle these situations -- you go from Job A to Job B with a number you want to keep and with both A and B picking up your phone costs. What happens during the handover?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Consider this situation - you forward incoming calls to new number (free within network) and then go abroad for holidays...

Anyway, this "nuisance" is not "a way of screwing the user for no reason" but rather technical.

Anonymous said...

AFAIK, call forwarding is supplementary GSM service based on outgoing calls. It is a limitation of technology/standard, not invention of marketing and sales people.
As follows, to enable call forwarding, service provider has to enable outgoing calls and limit this service for use only within home network for call forwarding exclusive. I believe it requires quite a lot of reworking of call centres - hardware and software.
This is possibility, but not very cheap one and neither very necessary.

Anonymous said...

Could you, please, name some providers who will forward calls while outgoing calls are disabled?

"these kind of things take several weeks" ? What exactly do you mean? Number porting from one service provider to another must be done within 10 working days and usualy there is no service interruption as in this case, when the actual customer of LMT (former employer of Juris Kaža, as I understand) asked to block outgoing calls. In this case there is going on number porting AND change of ownership simultaneously.

Concerning disagreement - as a customer I want all services I need to be available 24x7, but I do not agree that this is case of "screwing with people for no reason" (neither - with reason).