Airtel and South Africa’s MTN, the largest cell-phone operator in Africa, made a brief statement to shareholders on May 25 that they were hammering out a complex deal which would merge the companies. If successful, the deal would likely give Sunil Mittal control of a telecom behemoth that would have the third-largest number of subscribers in the world.

Well, I didn’t exactly post this to congratulate them. This is actually a rant. A few days ago, I tried downloading the “Google Maps mobile”. Simple enough, I went directly to the Google page using “Airtel live” and started downloading the app. After downloading 15KB it got stuck, so I canceled it. Now, I believe I may have taken around 2 mins for this whole process and after disconnecting, I got a message saying, I have been charged Rs 65/- for the last session. So, I called our friendly support people, I might have called 7 times in total.

What happened ? They say that the session lasted for some 400 seconds and I have downloaded 4xxxxxxx KB , don’t remember the exact number but it started with a 4 and had 6 digits (lets keep the lowest 400000). So, I asked them, how am I supposed to download 400000 KB in 6.7 mins (400 secs) ? Well, their answer was that “Our systems can’t be wrong“. I tried hard to tell ‘em its not possible to download that much with a 32kbps connection and one moron adamant with his statement that I have been fairly charged .

I called the Noda Officer here “Jyotsna Vishud” , explained her all this, she told me she’ll look into it, 2 weeks and nothing yet.

I’ve been using the gprs service for about a year now without any problem. I know there can mistakes in any business, but what grinds my gears is their failure to accept and their adamantly lame reasons to support their stupidity.