First of all I would like to note that this post is not applicable for PrimeTel corporate/business cases as all works pretty fine in that section and support is really great. More over this post is not about technical quality of PrimeTel (even for home users) as I am using them for more 3 years and have no complains what-so-ever. This is just about administrative side of support for private users.
I am using PrimeTel for home internet for few years and few months ago have also transferred my CYTA SoEasy mobile number to PrimeTel pay monthly to get proper 3G and contract on calls for a decent deposit amount. CYTA was not an option for two reasons: deposits are really huge and if your monthly bill is way to big they will not disconnect you, but will charge you. This is not good as if my mobile gets stolen and I have no way to notify CYTA on time – some one can make calls on few thousand euros and I will have to settle this bill. There were many stories to confirm this, but I am not going to write anything about it here.
So as I changed my mobile to PrimeTel, I got a mobile 15 package, which tells me that I have 15 euro calls included. Sounds great, I am happy, but…
Last month I had friends visiting Cyprus from Russia and they used Russian mobile number in island, so I had few calls to them and then, somehow, my mobile stopped calling any international numbers without giving me a reason. Digging into the problem with few friends from PrimeTel I was told that my limit for international calls is exceeded! WHAT? What you mean by “international calls”? I have a commitment for 15 euro per month (thought I). But the explanation was pretty cool: the 15 euro from the package are ONLY for LOCAL CALLS. WTF?! When I was using SoEasy I tend to buy a 10 euro card and I didn’t bother about destination of my calls. Each destination has it’s price per minute and it was fine with me. Why should 15 euro cover only local calls while I have to pay extra for international? This is somehow stupid.
Ok, my friends from PrimeTel told me that I should probably downgrade my mobile package to smaller amount (for local calls) as I am not utilizing what, so that my commitment would be 2 or 10 euro per months local calls and the rest I can cover extra with the difference from what I am paying at the moment. Fine, whatever, went to PrimeTel to downgrade and here we go: “if you want to downgrade your package you need to pay 15 euro once-off downgrade fee” – WTF?! Paying more to have less??? I can understand paying extra to upgrade, but to downgrade? Guys…..
Yet another case that happen before all this bullshit: as I was happy with PrimeTel mobile and pretty good 3G, I thought to bring my wife in and transfer her SoEasy to PrimeTel as well. So we came in. Obvious question from my side was: can I have both mobile numbers under same account so I can pay bills and see calls while logged in as a single user? Yes I can. This is called “Family Package”. Apart of controlling all numbers under this package from single place, the only additional benefit is that we gonna have 100 minutes of free calls in between us. This I was not really interested as 2 euro package would be enough for my wife to talk to me and her parents, but anyway. So all sounds good, but then I was told: “you need to pay 300 euro deposit” – and again WTF? The standard deposit for a mobile service in PrimeTel is 50 euro (and that’s what I paid for mine), so I assumed having to numbers would be 2×50. Why I need to pay bigger deposits while requesting basically same service?
One more case to go (but this I can understand to some extend): as my mother is currently not in Cyprus, she asked to terminate her internet connection. I grab here equipment, copy of her passport and my passport and go to PrimeTel. No luck here. They have requested an authorization letter from her to do the job. Ok, I can understand this to some extend, but on the other hand: I have her equipment with me, and our passport data (with the same surname and we are pretty alike if you on the photo) – I assume things should be a bit easier.
Anyhow, up to now I stayed with mobile 15 package, my wife told that she would stay with CYTA SoEasy, because “fuck all that bullshit and complications, SoEasy is easy – you buy a card for 10 euro and use it properly. When finished – you buy another one”. I think that PrimeTel really needs to review the way the treat private customers and the way they bundle the services.
Once again, this is not about technical quality as I am satisfied how things technically work and it is not about support for business customers, as I have quite few cases where I deal with PrimeTel as business account and all is just great there: fast response, good quality, no complains.