ETECSA One Option … / Anddy Sierra Alvarez

ETECSA: Telecommunications Corporation of Cuba.

A new strategy, a new option, improvements in their cell phone services is what Cubans were expecting starting February 1st, 2012. The offer that a message would cost 00.09 cuc was better than the previous 00.16 cuc, it was encouraging, the cost of a call was better since the person who called also had to pay for it, similar to the fixed lines, and the cost was 00.45 cuc per minute, better than the previous options since using *88 the person who called had to pay, but each minute would cost “00.60” cuc, similar to *99, where the person who was calling was charging the cost of the call to the receiver for the same tariff of “00.60” cuc.

The offer is not bad since there is an improvement, not big, but something is better than nothing. What happens then to ETECSA clients? Why is there a discomfort among clients?

The service they activated for customers so that the receiver would not have to pay for the call, was to activate *88, I mean,  the person who wants to phone a friend searches in the cellphone contacts and the number appears with *88 activated, it does not appear on the screen of the person who calls, but on the screen of the receiver, but the number of the calling person does not appear on that of the receiver, for example: -00535387234588- so that the name does no appear, despite the fact that it is in the telephone contacts!

The option would be to save it as it appears and one does not feel uncomfortable not knowing who is calling. But there is another problem, as it was saved the same way it had appeared in the example above, one can not send messages. The other option is to save it twice, one to identify the name if it is in the contacts and another one to send messages.

The only hope we have is to expect this small, but inconvenient, problem to improve, for the use of the cell phone.

Translated by AnonyGy

February 6 2012