The state of the Bulgarian market for mobile services

Free trade and competition are supposed to guarantee much higher quality of service to the customers. Nevertheless the Bulgarian market of mobile services shows quite the opposite – customers are mistreated, sometimes overcharged and forced to sign unfavorable terms.

Mobile phone services in Bulgaria are provided by three independent service providers and several virtual service providers. Despite the supposed competition on the market the quality of service from the providers’ employees is getting worse and worse. After the mobile phone number portability was forcefully imposed on the bulgarian market by an EU legislature the battle for customers became even more fierce. Currently, despite the Universal Service Directive of the EU, the mobile operators are using illegal tactics to keep their customers – bargaining and presenting special offers after a customer has deposited his determination to chose a different service provider, despite that being forbidden by law.

The General Conditions, that are integral part of every contract, are purposely written using jargon and contain a large number of purely racketeering clauses – e.g. a customer has to forfeit the remainder of his/hers subscription fee should he chose to change his service provider in the middle of the billing cycle, and despite paying his subscription fee in whole s/he also has to pay forfeit for the same period – i.e. he is charged twice for the same contractual obligation.

The Bulgarian state’s Communications Regulation Commission is in no position to do its job – to regulate. They have no direct access to the operators’ databases and have to require documents proving the operator’s guilt from the phone service customers. On top of that I have the suspicion that quite often the mobile operators are issuing falsified documents and thus blaming the delay in the number portability procedure on the customers and getting away with hefty fines.

The low amount of ported numbers – 0.5% of all subscribers for a year and a half ^[1] certainly proves that either there is no competition between the mobile phone service providers and prices are being fixed informally or that number portability is not truly working in practice.

Footnotes

[1] 15th Progress Report on the Single European Electronic Communications Market – 2009