Views and Reviews

Voicemail is for sure a definitive productivity enhancement tool that is intended as a rich time-saver to prevent leakage of our productivity in gossips that we do not need to be actively part of. Furthermore it ensures we do not get the risk of talking to Scammers and Spammers as these are effectively used as /dev/null by the Voicemail system.

However even the premiere telecom service providers in India have not been able to manage these Voicemail services perfectly. We have four operators currently providing telecom services in India. Here is how Voicemail is treated by each of them.

1. BSNL has effectively removed the Voicemail from their offerings in 2015
2. Reliance Jio does not even have any Voicemail product right from its inception in 2016
3. Vodafone had a broken voicemail system. They claimed to have completely revamped the same post the identity merge with Idea as Vi. But the newer one is not well documented. Despite being a unified identity the customer care has lame excuses like if you have Idea SIM then Voicemail services are not available. Also the pricing of the service is simply prohibitive.
4. Airtel has a partially working Voicemail system. They have FTN separate for each telecom circle but none of these are publicly documented. The agents do not have a knowledge about the services. When we ask about the same it all goes via a trial and error method.
1. For Tamil Nadu circle the activation itself gives Error through USSD code
2. For Tamil Nadu circle the activation through text gives a blocked message
3. For Tamil Nadu circle the activation through CustomerCare results in Service Request closure with a wrong FTN being configured to the account.
4. The CustomerCare claim that we need to deactivate all call forwarding for Voicemail to work. However the essence of Voicemail itself is selective call forwarding like ‘Unreachable’, ‘Busy’ and ‘Unanswered’ situations. Also the deactivation itself does not work giving a service error.
5. The short code 52555 is supposedly toll-free but not universally available on all Airtel circles and in National Roaming even on same circles. During on network Roaming you are expected to call a full access number at a premium charge which Airtel refuses to reimburse too.

Though the initiative of Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (shortly known as TRAI) and Department of Telecommunications (DoT) towards curbing the pesky unsolicited commercial communications menace is laudable, the implementation has been very much shaky. The success rate of the same is just close to around 30% approximately as telemarketers often get scott-free making good of the loopholes in the system.

Not sure whether these reflect the gross incompetency of the IT team deployed by TRAI into the operations and/or some sort of unholy nexus between insiders with rogue telemarketers that is serving  as root of all these mess.

1. The delimiter comma often confuses the 1909 server because the message itself can contain comma. Either the server should be configured to read the commas from end of the message so that last comma is date time, penultimate one for senderid  or calleridand whatever rest is the message.
2. Presence of extended ASCII characters and special characters are crashing the app/server. The server must be configured to accept any characters in the message.
3. In Dual SIM phones not sure why the app wants to confirm through which SIM the message to be registered as this is very much recorded as part of the phonebook.
4. Randomly a few calls are mysteriously not listed out for being reported in the app.
5. There is no way for re-opening a falsely closed complaint in the system.
6. Frequently the status window does not open up. It just opens a blank dialog with a OK button.

We would suggest GoI try to opensource the App on GitHub for colloborative computing among competent personnel and NIC Meity team can only be left with the job of publishing to the server. The current IT team in TRAI, is proving to be  totally incompetent the handle the pesky call menace.

We have reported a section of these showstoppers two weeks ago to their email address and even the breaking errors have not been cared for and/or fixed.

A letter on this topic has also been filed as a petition with the office of Hon’ble Prime Minister of India.