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TELEPHONE firms have demurred from keeping subscriber
records—traffic data, including origin, destination,
date, time, duration of calls—for six months as proposed
by the National Telecommunications Commission on the
ground it would be “too burdensome and costly” for them.
The NTC
wants to be able to resolve customer concerns about
billing and fraud using the preserved data.
Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. asked the NTC to
first define what is covered under basic post-paid
service. If the post-paid service covers subscription of
cellular service then the phone giant is amenable to the
2-month duration.
For
postpaid and prepaid landline service, PLDT’s first vice
president for regulatory and telecom industry relations
Alfred Carrera said only billed call data can be
retained for three months, but not free calls, which
comprise about 80 percent of traffic data. “It will be
costly to retain all traffic data which includes billed
data as well as free calls.”
He said
prepaid cellular data can only be stored for two weeks.
“The proposed 6-month holding period for other
telecommunications services, meanwhile, is too
burdensome considering that bulk of cellular subscribers
are in the prepaid category and the hardware equipment
needed to store six months of data for an estimated 20
million subscribes will also be too costly.”
Globe
Telecom proposed that the holding period for both
postpaid and prepaid subscriptions be limited to two
months.
“Our
customer engagement experience indicates that a
subscriber would logically seek to resolve a purported
concern immediately; calling attention to it say, beyond
two months, would merely dull the reliability/veracity
of the subscriber’s claim,” said Globe head for
regulatory affairs Froilan Castelo.
To store
the records for more than two months, Castelo said,
“would be a shameful waste of resources,” because this
carries a significant cost.
“Even if
a thousand complaints surface in a span of two months,
then it is still obviously more economical to save the
relevant data logs for these thousand references for an
entire year, than to store for more than two months, the
communication records of our close to 17 million mobile
phone subscribers,” added Castelo.
Castelo
said their reason for objecting to the 6-month proposed
requirement is that “storing this data…is a welcome
non-negotiable in looking after all our customers. But,
under the logical assumption that disagreement will not
be communicated two months past its crux, maintaining
data logs outside this timeframe no longer serves the
stated goal.” |
