You want cheap calls, we will give you cheap calls

Ha ha remember the time it used to be a status symbol of sorts to use a hand phone?
Before the flood sort of thing —- antediluvian?
Before every fishmonger and street corner beggar had a hand phone?
Well those were the bad old days, when so-called cellphone rates cost an arm and a leg.
And calling on a cellphone was like taking an IDD call to Alaska or some place like that.
Well our dear TRC authorities and their big shots who regulate the telecom industry want to go back to that era.
Recently some TRC spokesman was crying to a reporter in a newspaper saying that computers cost the telecom industry some billions of rupees per year.
Basically they were saying how can the industry survive if Skype which allows you to call globally on a computer, is making all the money?
Boo hoo - ban Skype.
But the day I really realised that they want to go back to the era when hand phones were like Rolls-Royces, was when those regulator guys said that they want to have a floor price on phone rates — because the industry is going to rack and ruin due to under-cutters.
So now when you contemplate your mobile phone bill please be happy that you are saving the fat-cats of the Sri Lankan phone industry. Who knows that way they may be helping you to acquire merit, so you can reach nirvana or whatever your moksha you believe in, very soon.
You see the regulators want to save the industry —— after all ha ha, you foot the bill for it and not them. BOO - the joke is on you, ah.

Foreign competitors

I heard that they want to impose the floor price on call charges because they feel that some foreign competitors are undercutting and spoiling the local hand phone industry.
But when you look at the local hand phone industry you find that all these ‘locals’ are queerly, Malaysians.
Basically they are saying we have imposed the floor price so that you the customer can help to us save the Malaysians from the Indians. Or something like that anyway.
Anyway in all these news items about floor prices and ‘international calls on computers’ depriving the industry of millions, the customer is not even a cipher --- a marginal consideration, even.
Why should he be, no?
Telecom regulation in Sri Lanka is all about saving the industry not about helping the customer. After all communications is about the industry, not about people calling each other - what do you think, are you daft?
So next time you take your call, please realise that the call cost should really be unaffordable because your main function is to save the industry.
Ha so you say that that you only want to speak to somebody over the phone — not to save anybody’s ass.
Yeah right.
The entire telecommunications industry is about saving the telecommunications industry. If you think it is about helping you to call somebody and communicate, at affordable rates, you have seen too many handphone advertisements - plus you live in cloud cuckoo land.

Glitzy advertisements

Get this into your heads, courtesy the telecom regulatory authority.
Your taking the cheapest possible call is only in glitzy advertisements.
In reality you’re supposed to take the most expensive calls and never take an international call on a computer, because you are an industry murderer if you do so.
This industry has never heard of healthy competition —— the free market.
Who the hell do you think you are to go for the cheapest possible alternative service provider?
The most important people in the communications industry are those who run it.
You are there to serve them, get that.
The computer is there for typing and not for taking telephone calls. And your phone bill is there so that you can help the telephone industry —- and not so that at the end of the day you can feel that you have communicated with the people you want to, without losing an arm and a leg.
Really why are Sri Lankans so naive? See the TRC has to wipe our people’s heads on the floor shouting “floor prices’ to get this little sense into their brains, ne?