Sunday, May 09, 2010

Botswana - Call for BTC to improve its fixed line service, monitoring and repairing faults

[mmegi online] In today's world, communication is most vital. For a long time, fixed telephony was the backbone of telecommunications, even after the advent of mobile telephony. Landlines still play a significant role in everyday communication. Since it is comparatively cheap, fixed telephony is usual the preferred mode of business transaction. A lot of data transfer such as fax and ISDN are still based on this type of telecommunicatiions.

This, without doubt holds the competitive edge over the popular cell phones.
Users of fixed line telephones would have noticed a disturbing trend that every time it rains, BTC lines usually go dead. We do not know whether this is the technology or some hardware used in these telephones. But this is what usually happens every time it rains some BTC lines - mostly residential lines - pack up.

Usually when you ring a number it will give you a ring tone while on the other end the gadget will not be responding. So the person you are calling will not hear the phone ringing.

The sad thing is that the service provider, Botswana Telecommunications Corporations engineers and technicians do not pick this up until it is reported to them. Given the regularity with which this inconvenience happens to some customers, it becomes a burden that every time they are called upon to report a fault to one national fault line that is often busy and the poor customer is forced to wait for eons.

It is baffling that in this technological era, BTC has not come up with a system that monitors faults to correct them without burdening customers with monotonous fault reports that happen every time there is a slight drizzle. We concede that the BTC turnaround time in attending to faults has improved but there is still room for improvement.

BTC must jack up service

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