SMS Alerts Services were temporarily halted by the vendor who is offering services to IGNOU. The services were halted since November 7th, 2012. Government organizations stopped sending most of the SMS alerts vowing to price hike by vendors across the Country. The price hike was nearly 5 times. It all started with the legal tussle between AirTel and Tata Teleservices. Court ruled that Tata Tele needs to pay appr. Rs.250 crores (figure not accurate) towards SMS termination charges. As on the date of ruling, no SMS termination charges exist. Termination charges exist only for voice calls. The ruling triggered hike of SMS charges by all the operators as every operator is expecting this particular case to be cited as reference by other operators to collect extra charges for them. Ultimately, any charges to be borne by the companies are passed to customer. Hence are the charges hiked. If you carefully notice, not all SMSs that are being sent from your mobiles are delivered to the destination mobile phone. You must have already experienced it.
The vendor mailed the prices 2 days before effecting hike with a warning that he will halt services if the confirmation of accepting hike is not communicated to him. No government organization can accept hike in prices in two days. Normally, Govt. organizations don't accept hike in such services. In his communication to IGNOU, the vendor also mentioned that the bills since Jan/Feb, 2012 are pending. Of course, in Govt. organizations, always, there will be departments which are inefficient. We cannot avoid them as the staff of those departments also take salaries and work needs to be assigned to them. These departments cannot be allowed to continue to be lazy.
Any way, what ever it is, the real sufferer is STUDENT. There is no communication that is faster than SMS. We started working on the revival at the earliest. Let's hope that we will succeed despite the presence of inefficient departments due to whom good things get blocked and STUDENT suffers.
I wish all the best to our Students. At a critical time when they are attending to their term end examinations, this service got halted due to which our RCs are unable to communicate with them.
I shall be posting updates regularly on the revival.
The vendor mailed the prices 2 days before effecting hike with a warning that he will halt services if the confirmation of accepting hike is not communicated to him. No government organization can accept hike in prices in two days. Normally, Govt. organizations don't accept hike in such services. In his communication to IGNOU, the vendor also mentioned that the bills since Jan/Feb, 2012 are pending. Of course, in Govt. organizations, always, there will be departments which are inefficient. We cannot avoid them as the staff of those departments also take salaries and work needs to be assigned to them. These departments cannot be allowed to continue to be lazy.
Any way, what ever it is, the real sufferer is STUDENT. There is no communication that is faster than SMS. We started working on the revival at the earliest. Let's hope that we will succeed despite the presence of inefficient departments due to whom good things get blocked and STUDENT suffers.
I wish all the best to our Students. At a critical time when they are attending to their term end examinations, this service got halted due to which our RCs are unable to communicate with them.
I shall be posting updates regularly on the revival.
