Satelindo promises to pay double billings

JAKARTA (JP): Cellular phone operator PT Satelindo's president, Iwa Sewaka, promised yesterday his company would compensate customers for recent billing errors.

Iwa said Satelindo would reimburse subscribers who had been billed twice after an error in the company's billing system over the past two weeks.

"We will fix new billing equipment by Aug. 1," he said.

Iwa said Satelindo was upgrading its billing system.

"It will take about three months, but everything will be fine this week," he said.

As the first of three operators of the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) in Indonesia, Satelindo has launched a series of gimmicks to attract customers.

But the company failed to anticipate how quickly its customer base would grow and its network's capacity was insufficient.

Thousands of Satelindo's GSM users were confused and upset after being billed twice for the same month.

Satelindo rarely responded to customers calls and when it did they did not provide satisfactory information.

"I don't think that the customer service attendants understand what's going on in their company," one customer said.

In late May, a technical error caused Satelindo's network to crash for more than 12 hours.

The failure occurred during the company's network expansion project. Customers in Greater Jakarta could not make or receive calls for a day.

Analysts said such problems could affect Satelindo's image ahead of its initial public offering next year.

Satelindo's has about 380,000 customers, of which about 300,000 are in Greater Jakarta.

The three GSM operators in Indonesia are concentrating on Greater Jakarta which is a key market.

But networks in Greater Jakarta are still not perfect with frequent blank spots and calls being cut off. (icn)