Czech have been called on to switch off their beloved mobile phones in a protest against the high charges imposed by the country’s three main operators.
A call for users to switch off their phones for one hour on Monday was led by one of two Facebook protests: “We don’t want overpriced calls and services” (Nechceme předražené volání a služby). Two of the three operators, Vodafone and Telefonica, which is responsible for the O2 network, told the business daily Hospodářské noviny (HN) on Tuesday that they had not noticed any considerable impact on their normal traffic. The third main operator is T-Mobile.
The paper highlighted the fact that the two protest social network sites have already garnered more than 120,000 members between them with “Nechceme” recording a 10 percent rise in fans/members over the past week. The site has pledged to continue protests in the coming days.
High numbers
The mobile phone operators deny that they are making Czechs, in particular individual users, pay through the nose for their services — though international comparisons beg to differ with this assertion.
A study by the for the club of rich, developed countries, the OECD, found that Czechs were on average paying at least around 20 percent more than counterparts in neighboring Germany, Austria, Poland and Slovakia for a low-use package of calls and SMS messages. For a mid-sized package of services, they were paying around a third more than in Germany and more than twice as much in Austria and Poland.
The results for a high-use package of services showed Czechs paying the most in the entire OECD with charges around twice the average for the 34-country grouping. Czech charges were around three times higher than those in Poland and an astonishing six times those in Austria. The figures were drawn from the OECD’s 2011 communications outlook and were based on data from August 2010.
Toothless regulator?
Czechs hopes of cheaper mobile phone calls and messages were raised when the third operator, using the brand name Oskar when launched in 2000 and rebranded by Vodafone which took it over in 2005. Czech consumers charge the three giant phone companies with operating a cozy oligarchy with the regulator, the Czech Telecommunications Office (ČTÚ), passively allowing them to continue bleeding consumers.
A fourth mobile operator, Mobilkom, entered the market in 2007, using the brand name U:fon. At the end of 2009 it claimed just 135,000 customers with 65,000 of them using fast mobile Internet, 35,000 mobile call services and the remaining 35,000 wireless fixed-line services. It said than that its main priority then was to expand its services to large customers, the main price battleground between the phone operators.
Czechs are high users of mobile phones with the ČTÚ’s 2010 annual report estimating that 80 percent of all calls now take place from mobiles. Fixed-line phone traffic has fallen to a third of the volume recorded in 2003, according to the same report. Mobile phone ownership is so high that there were around a third more mobile phone numbers than the total Czech population in 2008.
