TelCel's Strategy: Flaws as Features

I guess it’s rant week. Oh well. It’s not my first choice, but it must be said: TelCel is Satan. This absurd communications giant sells a service that it doesn’t provide, sends offers that it doesn’t actually honor, and gives the most inconsistent and crappy Internet connection I’ve ever had… ever! That includes dialup in the early nineties, people!

Let me slow down a bit and properly explain the malevolent practices of the demon that is TelCel.

Service… NOT!

TelCel sells Internet services at a speed of up to 3.2 MBPS. What the tricky bastards don’t tell you is that you will most often connect at something dumb like 1.9 kbps. The speed will fluctuate and never get anywhere near 3.2 MBPS. Moreover —ha  ha ha— the speed will regularly dip down to 0.00 kbps. Technically, your ridiculous little TelCel window will claim you are connected, but if no data is moving in any direction, guess how much you can get done?

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Offers… Psyche!

TelCel regularly bombards users with text messages promising to double your minutes should you choose to add a certain amount of money to your prepaid phone. The evil company assures the flock they fleece that only those who qualify receive the text. That is, of course, what is well known the world over as “a big fat lie.”

Solution? Call, right? Only if you like to sit on hold half the morning. But no worries, a complete idiot who is not allowed to think will answer the phone, and he will read you his little troubleshooting scripts verbatim over and over and over. When you exhaust his repeat cycles, he will hand you to a supervisor, who will politely admit that TelCel made a mistake… and that they do not plan to correct it.

You see, at TelCel the system is a mysterious force that does things no one can control. When it makes mistakes the monkeys that run the system can only ooo-ah-ah and scratch their heads, completely confused. I know this because the supervisor kindly explained to me that no one at TelCel could change or in any way alter the system… not even the technicians or the computer engineers that created it. You think I’m kidding, don’t you? Well, I’m not. So, either the supervisor had a lobotomy in exchange for his promotion or he assumes everyone who calls has had one.

Summary: TelCel knows they cheat people and they don’t have a problem with it.

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Internet Disconnection

I understand that I’ve already mentioned their speed issues, but to add to the fun, they have connection issues.

Let’s travel back to a time when the Internet was a slow, practically static digital wonder. If you missed the joys of being kicked off the Internet constantly or taking a zillion years to download an image, rest assured that you can now live those ancient hair-pulling moments. All you need is a Huawei USB modem activated with Beelzebub. Pardon, I mean TelCel.

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And now you know why we spend so much time at the local coffee house during the week. 

You know, the only place this crap is tolerable is the Caribbean. Thank God the palapa we work from on weekends has a good signal. The turquoise perfection of the sea washes away so much. And thus endeth the rant.