Customers of fixed-line telecoms provider Alpha Telecom have been complaining about a lack of service, with the company admitting it is currently experiencing ‘technical difficulties’.
The provider launched an MVNO with Vodafone called Alpha Mobile in August last year, targeting consumers with prepaid Sim services and unlimited call time.
However, the company said on its website last week that it was experiencing issues. It said: ‘We are experiencing some technical issues, and are working on having them resolved. The lines should be operative by the end of today. We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience.’
Despite assurances that it would have the issues resolved quickly, the note on the site had been there for almost a week when Mobile went to press.
Customers have also complained about the lack of service. One wrote on Mobile’s website: ‘Alpha Mobile has been uncontactable for the past number of days. It also appears that both its Facebook and Twitter pages/feeds have been removed. We tried contacting its call centre on the numbers provided without success. What is going on?’ Alpha Telecom’s Twitter feed has been inactive since 16 December, when it tweeted: ‘hello world’.
Mobile put numerous calls to Alpha Mobile CEO Zafar Mirza, who did not return requests for interview. Vodafone and its MVNO aggregator Cognatel both declined to comment. Repeated calls to both Alpha Mobile and Alpha Telecom went unanswered.
When the MVNO launched, Alpha Mobile boasted it was bringing more than 650,000 Alpha Telecom customers to the network and said more than 57,000 used it on a daily basis. Mirza told Mobile last August that he wanted to take ‘our customer promise to deliver high quality, low-cost products and services to the mobile phone market’.
Editor: Carol Millett