BlackBerry users in Pakistan have been deprived of benefitting from compensation RIM offered after it went offline.
LAHORE: Last month, Research in Motion’s BlackBerry services went offline worldwide, causing immense problems to its users. RIM did come up with a compensation planned but it was discriminatory. Only users of their application download software (App World) could avail $100 worth of free premium applications. This is discriminatory because BlackBerry users in Pakistan are not able to benefit from it, on the grounds that App World is not allowed in Pakistan. For no fault of their own, BlackBerry users in Pakistan have been deprived of benefitting from this compensation.
Even our telecom operators did not compensate the users despite the fact that for the days the service was not available, subscription fees were being charged. I sent an email on this to the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority but got no response from them.
My service provider (Telenor) replied after my second email to them but instead of saying anything about providing compensation, all they said was that they had suffered immensely as well. Compare this to what happened in countries like Nigeria and South Africa where operators gave cash compensation to their customers.
As a user of BlackBerry services in Pakistan — and there must be thousands of others — on whose doors should I be knocking for compensation?
Shahrukh Salman
Published in The Express Tribune, November 18th, 2011.
