Malaysia`s DiGi Telco Cheating An Estimated Half Billion A Year

Malaysia's DiGi mobile phone telco is cheating its subscribers by an estimated half billion Malaysian dollars a year.
Tests show that the unscrupulous cell phone operator is sending calls to voice-mail even when the phone is receiving a strong network signal.

Calls being made to DiGi mobiles are routed to voice-mail without any delay whatsoever, thus not allowing for any switching times.

When a client does not respond to calls that DiGi does pass through, the time before being routed to voice-mail is very short, compared to other oversea operators, not allowing the mobile phone user sufficient time to answer incoming calls before the caller is routed to voice-mail.

Each time a call is routed to voice mail from a Digi phone, the caller is billed 12 cents, and charges for calls routed to DiGi voicemail from other operators may be even higher.

The company robs users double in many cases, as Digi users are forced to call their voicemail, again whilst being billed, in order to retrieve messages left by callers who would have otherwise reached the subscribers handset, were it not for the tweaking of systems to route callers to voicemail.

The costs to overseas callers into Malaysia are estimated to be several billion dollars per year.

Moreover the company has been found to be billing subscribers for services that were cancelled, such as the monthly Internet service for post-paid business companies, at 68 Malaysian dollars per month.

The company requests that cancellations are faxed to them, but then does not proceed to cancel and continues to bill for those services.

DiGi pre-paid mobile charging is however fairer than the other operators, in that although charged at a rate of 10 cents per 10 kb, as soon as $5 Malaysian is reached, there is no further charge for the day. If more than 100MB data is transferred in a day, the speed may be throttled.

Mathaba advises DiGi users to call customer service on 016-2211800 to demand deactivation of voice-mail, as well as requesting to prolong your calling tone. Users are also advised not to subscribe to any special caller ringing tones as these may not be prolonged.

DiGi has some 8 million subscribers in Malaysia making up a little over a quarter of the total mobile phone subscriber base in the country and is 49% owned by Telenor.

Mathaba has found extensive cheating by all 3 large Malaysian mobile telcos, which rate worse than those of its neighbors Singapore and Thailand.

Unlike its two neighbours to the north and south, the Malaysian mobile Internet is both unreliable and costly, much of the time failing to perform, with 3G and 3.5G having slower actual throughput speeds than Thailand's EDGE.

Calls on Skype phone from mobiles on Celcom and Maxis proved generally impossible according to tests conducted, whilst Digi's EDGE performed reliably even for Skype voice calls, similar to Thailand where 3G is generally not available due to licensing issues.

Digi is now starting to operate 3G and 3.5G broadband which we have not yet tested, but provides good GPRS/EDGE coverage, whilst Maxis and Celcom provide mobile broadband services that extensively rip off subscribers as is being reported in other news articles.

Users of mobile operators in Malaysia are invited to leave comments below, and the Telcos are urged to redress this situation, provide a working customer service without cost to subscribers and to compensate users for failure to provide services billed for.

Digi is called upon to provide exact and verifiable figures and come clean about its revenue from voice mail, how many calls are routed to voice mail each day, its switching policies and technical parameters, and to make it easy for its users to opt out of the service by default.

Technicians and employees of the company who wish to share further information in confidence, may make use of our secure contact form - communications via this form is encrypted and not visible to ISP nor telco within Malaysia.