PAYING WITHOUT RECEIVING VALUE

Sometime ago in my office, we had to file a law suit against an internet service provider because we were unable to use the internet for the best part of a whole month though we paid in full for that month. It was in the days before Blackberry became a fad in Nigeria. We needed to do research on the internet we were unable to, clients sent urgent mails but we had limited resources outside of our internet service provider to adequately check and respond timeously. We at a point, had to resort to cyber cafes to do some of the heavy online work we needed to do. We had several times before then experienced similar problems which we communicated to our service provider without any real positive result. That particular month was by far the worst so far because our internet did not work for up to a cumulative period of 10 hours during that month. The service provider made no attempt to offer any compensation for all the lost hours and days. We took them to court and resolved never to use them again. This kind of situation plays out with a lot of services we pay for in advance. Once we pay in advance, most service providers care little whether consumers actually get value for the money paid. Especially in circumstances where the competitors also adopt similar attitude because there are not too many of them to pick from and a lot of us consider the cost of starting again with another provider particularly in the case of internet and pay TV. We send text messages, it fails but we are still charged, PHCN doesn't supply power, we are nevertheless still exorbitantly billed (except for those fortunate enough to have the pre-paid meter which they have stopped distributing), the internet will not work, but we still pay...All these continue because we accept them, we shrug and continue, we are silent, we grumble and let everything slide... Imagine a situation where more people take out actions against our service providers or at least complain very loudly but civilly. Have you ever noticed that a lot of companies and businesses do their utmost to avoid customers making a scene? Now, I am not advocating us making scenes, but we could flood the internet, the social media, the newspaper with reports of these lack of value received in spite of money paid and watch if there'll be any change. Sometime ago when there was a problem with Blackberry services, after the resolution of the problem Glo compensated its blackberry subscribers with 3 extra days to replace the lost days. This is the right practice and should be commended. What do you think? Should subscribers, whether to mobile telephone networks, internet or cable TV be made to pay for days lost due to the service provider's fault?