Casiño seeks passage of law vs abuses of mobile phone firms

DAVAO CITY—Bayan Muna Representative Teddy Casiño urged fellow lawmakers to pass the proposed Mobile Phone Subscribers Act even at the committee level as their Christmas gift to over 60 million Filipino mobile phone users.

Casiño said the measure, House Bill No. 5653, would address mobile subscribers’ recurring complaints about dropped calls and missing loads by requiring telecommunications firms to provide a detailed billing of both prepaid credits and postpaid consumption, lowered pulse rates and other service improvements.

The bill also seeks to protect consumers against overcharging and other abuses by giant telecom firms, said Casiño, who filed the bill in December last year, following the failure of the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) to compel telecom companies to reduce the cost of sending a text message by 20 centavos.

“We are urging our fellow congressmen to approve it, at least at the committee level before our Christmas break, as a gift to Filipino mobile phone subscribers,” Casiño said at news forum here.

The bill has been at the level of the House’s committee on information, communications and telecommunications, he said. “It has been languishing for a long time, but we are not giving up hope,” Casiño said.

Casiño said he estimated that the overcharging could reach P6 billion. Germelina Lacorte, Inquirer Mindanao