TRA probes plaints on roaming bills

The Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) has started an investigation of 12 complaints regarding mobile international roaming bills, which have shocked consumers with a total value of around BD 30,000.

TRA’s Director of Consumer Affairs Sh. Abdulla bin Humood Al Khalifa said, “During the first quarter of this year, we noticed an increase in the number of consumer complaints related to roaming cases and in the amounts being billed to consumers for mobile roaming. One of the cases that is being currently investigated has a value of BD 12,800.”

“During separate meetings late last year, TRA urged the three mobile telecommunications service providers to take voluntary actions on the roaming bill shocks such as establishing a maximum threshold to trigger warnings and to adopt risk management measures like suspending the mobile services when an agreed limit is reached,” he elaborated.

“It is completely unacceptable and unfair that consumers do not receive the adequate level of transparency regarding the cost and volume of their usage of mobile roaming services. We are trying to resolve those cases in hand and studying the implementation of additional regulatory measures to ensure that consumers are notified when they’re about to reach their limits to prevent them from incurring additional charges,” he added.

In Box

Be prudent while roaming

• Data roaming charges are very expensive. Ensure that the data roaming function is switched off on your mobile phone.

• Contact your service provider and check roaming rates of the country you’ll be visiting.

• Make sure that your mobile device is not on “automatic network selection” feature, as it might shift to a non-preferred network while roaming, and will cause extra charges.

• If you are subscribed to a data-roaming package with your service provider, select your preferred overseas network manually.