January 1 was a milestone in the history of the telecommunications industry in Hong Kong. With the opening up of local fixed-line telecom network services, Hong Kong has liberalised the telecoms industry, from carriers to valued-added service providers.
The good news is that users can enjoy a wide range of services from different operators at a competitive price. But there has also been an unprecedented number of complaints. What has gone wrong? Is the quality of service really degraded? What are the expectations for quality of service? And what should we do to fix it?
A common myth is that competition will improve quality. Not true. The complaint statistics from the Office of the Telecommunications Authority (Ofta) show an alarming trend.
The number of complaints is projected to rise 36 per cent from 1,733 in 2001 to 2,361 for last year. In 1997, there were 87 complaints. Recent statistics from the Consumer Council revealed 4,684 cases in 2001, up 51 per cent on 2000. Of these complaints, Internet services have overtaken mobile-phone services as the top troublemakers.
It is also obvious that from a business consumer's perspective, the quality of service criteria for different services are not transparent. Some of these have been crafted in Service Level Agreements (SLA), but the majority are never published.
Even in the recent network jam incident of September 11 last year, the lack of transparency between fixed and mobile networks led a lot of people to complain about the quality of our networks, even though the latter are among the world's best.
The fixed network is engineered to allow a maximum of one out of 100 calls to be blocked, and five out of 100 for the mobile network except in emergency circumstances. These network quality-of-service measurements should be published regularly so that consumers have more information when choosing an operator.