Complaining about your mobile operator or internet provider in Nepal

An unauthorised value-added service charge is two problems wearing one coat. There is the recurring deduction that will take money again tomorrow and next week, and there is the money already gone. They are settled separately and in that order, because every day you spend arguing about the refund is another day of charges you will then have to argue about as well.

Before you touch anything, screenshot the subscription confirmation message. It is the single most valuable artefact in this entire complaint. It normally names the service, names the short code it runs from, gives the charge, and carries the operator's own instruction for stopping it — and once you deactivate, the operator's records may be the only place it survives. Screenshot the deduction messages too, with the timestamps visible, and screenshot your balance before and after if you can catch it.

There are three ways out and it is worth trying them in this order. Reply to the short code with the stop keyword the operator specifies in its own confirmation or renewal message. If nothing arrives or nothing happens, open the operator's self-care app or dial its self-care menu and look for active services or my subscriptions, where subscriptions can normally be listed and switched off. If both fail, call customer care.

When you call, do not ask about the one service you noticed. Ask the agent to read out every active value-added subscription on the number, deactivate all of them, and send you written confirmation. There is very often more than one, and households discover that a number has been quietly carrying two or three small daily charges for months. Ask for the list in writing rather than accepting a verbal assurance that it is all clear now.

This is regulated ground, not a private disagreement, and it helps to say so. The Authority's published bylaws index carries a bylaw on the operation of digital value-added services issued in 2080, and its procedures index carries a 2077 procedure for the management of short codes and toll-free numbers used in telecommunications services. The services and the codes they are delivered from both sit inside the Authority's rule-set, which is exactly why an unauthorised charge is something the Authority can be asked to look at.

Deactivation is forward-looking only. Nothing about switching a subscription off returns the money already taken, and no operator will treat the two as one request unless you make it one. In the same call, state the refund you want — the amounts, the dates, the number they were taken from — and get a complaint or ticket reference for the refund claim specifically, not just for the deactivation.

Then watch the number for a fortnight. A deduction that continues after a confirmed deactivation is a far stronger complaint than the original one, because it is no longer about whether you consented; it is about the operator failing to act on its own confirmed instruction. Log every subsequent charge with its date and amount.

Finally, run the same check on every handset in the house, particularly those belonging to older relatives and children. The pattern that catches one number in a family usually catches several, and the people least likely to read a Nepali-language charging message carefully are the people most likely to be paying for something they never chose.

The operator stage is not a formality you can skip because you already know how it will go. The Authority's grievance application form explicitly asks whether the complaint was put to the service provider first, asks for copies of the correspondence you had with the provider, and asks what the provider's response was. If those boxes are empty, you are handing the Authority a reason to do nothing.

Use a channel that leaves a record. The operators publish customer support and grievance pages on their own websites — Ncell links a grievance management section from its home page and Nepal Telecom carries a contact section covering its fixed line, mobile, internet and value-added services — and a written channel is worth more than a call, because a call leaves you with a memory and an email leaves you with a document. If you cannot find your internet provider's number at all, the Authority publishes a list of toll-free customer-service numbers for licensed ISPs, running to eighty-six entries.

Whatever channel you use, come away with a complaint or ticket reference. Write it down with the date, the time and the name of the person who gave it to you. Everything after this point attaches to that reference, and a subscriber who opens with a reference and a date is handled differently from one who opens with a description of how frustrated they are.

State the remedy. This is the step people skip and it changes the outcome more than any other. Not 'my internet is bad' but 'restore the committed speed or credit the eleven days the line was down'; not 'you took my money' but 'refund the amounts deducted on these dates from this number'. A complaint with no stated remedy gets an apology, because an apology answers it.

Set a deadline in writing and say what happens after it. A short, unemotional message saying you expect the matter resolved by a stated date, failing which you will register the grievance with the Nepal Telecommunications Authority, does two things at once — it frequently moves the file inside the operator, and it creates the dated record that stage two will rest on.

Escalate inside the operator before you leave it. Front-line agent, then supervisor, then the published grievance or customer-support desk, and note the date and the outcome of each. Three documented attempts inside the operator is a much better opening for a regulatory complaint than one, and it takes days rather than weeks.

If the operator refuses to give you a reference number, or tells you the matter is closed without telling you why, record that too. A refusal to issue a reference is itself something to put in the narrative section of the Authority's form, and it removes the operator's usual defence that it was never given the chance to fix things.

Keep the tone flat throughout. The person on the other end of a customer-care line did not design the charging system, and a file full of measured, dated, specific messages reads very differently to a regulator than a file full of anger. The evidence does the arguing.

Telecom complaints are won on records and lost on recollection. The Authority's grievance form asks for the detailed sequence of events with dates, and for supporting evidence or copies of correspondence with the provider. Build that file as you go rather than trying to reconstruct it after three months, because the messages you need have a habit of being deleted by the phone that received them.

For a balance or deduction complaint, the file is: the subscription confirmation message you never asked for, every charging message with its timestamp, your balance immediately before and after where you have it, any recharge receipts around those dates, and the operator's written confirmation of deactivation. Dates and amounts, in order, on one page.

For a billing or data-pack complaint, keep the purchase confirmation, the terms of the pack as they were advertised at the time, and the bill or statement. Ask the operator for the usage record behind the charge — a request for the underlying data is a reasonable one and how an operator answers it is informative on its own.

For a quality-of-service complaint, you need measurement rather than description, because that is how the Authority approaches quality itself. Its quality-of-service bylaw, issued in 2079 and replacing the earlier 2073 version, is supported by standard operating procedures for measuring quality through the OSS method and through drive tests, and the Authority publishes drive test reports for mobile services. A regime built on measurement responds to measurements.

So test properly. Connect a computer to the router by cable before blaming the provider, then test repeatedly at the times that matter — weekday evenings, when the network is loaded — and log date, time, download, upload and latency each time. Ten dated results showing a pattern is evidence. One bad test on a Sunday afternoon is an anecdote, and it will be treated as one.

For a coverage complaint, record the specific location, whether you were indoors or outdoors, the dates and times, and whether another operator's SIM works at the same spot. Coverage complaints are the hardest to win precisely because they are usually reported as a general impression rather than as a place and a time.

For an internet outage, keep a downtime log — when it went, when it came back, the ticket number raised on each occasion. Days out of service is the unit a credit gets calculated in, and a provider will not calculate it for you.

Keep everything in one place, named by date, and export the messages off the handset. Assemble it as a single attachment before you go to the Authority, because a complete file gets read once and an incomplete one generates a request for documents and a delay.

There are two ways in and they lead to the same place. The Authority operates an online complaint handling system, linked from its home page, and it publishes a grievance application form on its website setting out what a complaint must contain. Use whichever you can complete properly; the form is the better guide to what the Authority expects, because it tells you the questions before you have to answer them.

The form is organised into eleven parts and it asks for a predictable set of things: your name, address and telephone number; the name of the service provider and the type of service you receive from it; the category of the complaint, with billing and connection called out separately from other issues; a detailed account with dates and the sequence of what happened; the resolution you are seeking; supporting evidence or copies of your correspondence with the provider; whether you raised the matter with the provider before coming to the Authority; and the provider's response if one was given.

Write the narrative as a chronology and keep it dry. Date, what happened, amount, reference number, next date. Resist the temptation to explain how the experience made you feel, and resist the temptation to allege more than your documents support. A three-hundred-word factual sequence with attachments outperforms two pages of grievance every time.

Put the remedy in a single sentence of its own. Refund of the amounts deducted on these dates. Credit for eleven days without service. Cancellation of the contract without an early-exit charge. Correction of a bill. The Authority is being asked to look at conduct against a published rule-set, and it helps enormously if it can see precisely what outcome would close the matter.

The Authority's registered address is at Jamal in Kathmandu, with a post box, and it publishes a telephone number, a fax number and the general email address [email protected] on its contact page. The grievance form itself directs complaints to the Authority in Kathmandu at that email address. Keep a copy of everything you send and of any registration or reference the system returns.

Then follow it up in writing, quoting your reference. Neither the complaint handling system nor the grievance form page publishes a resolution timeline, so do not wait for one — diarise a follow-up for a couple of weeks out and send a short message asking for the status. Persistence that is polite and documented is the whole technique.

It is worth knowing that the Authority handles cases under a written procedure of its own: its bylaws index includes a complaint-action procedure bylaw issued in 2068. Your file is not disappearing into a mailbox; it is entering a process, and the more it looks like something that process can act on, the better it will do.

Do not close the operator stage while the Authority stage runs. Keep paying attention to the account, keep logging further incidents, and send the operator any new evidence with the original ticket reference. Complaints are frequently settled by the operator once it is clear that a regulatory file exists, and you want the operator's own record to show that you kept engaging with it.

The Authority's reach follows its licences. It licenses the telecommunications service providers and the internet service providers operating in Nepal — it publishes an index of licensed ISPs alongside links to their own subscriber portals, and a list of ISP toll-free customer-service numbers — and it regulates their conduct through published instruments including directions issued to voice service providers and to internet service providers in 2077, a set of consumer-related directions also dated 2077, and a bylaw on the operation of internet and email services issued in 2077.

Tariff complaints are firmly inside the perimeter. The Authority publishes approved tariff lists for voice operators and for internet service providers, and its guidelines index carries a 2079 guideline on the tariff approval pathway for telecommunications services. That means 'I was charged something other than the approved tariff' is a regulatory allegation with a published reference point behind it, rather than an argument about what seems fair.

So are quality complaints, through the 2079 quality-of-service bylaw and the measurement procedures that sit under it. This is the category most subscribers never think to raise, because they assume a slow connection is bad luck rather than a matter of a licensee's obligations. It is also the category where your dated test log does the most work.

Some things that look like telecom problems are not service complaints at all. A lost or stolen handset, an IMEI question, or a device that will not work on a Nepali network is a matter for the Authority's mobile device management system, which handles device registration and lost or stolen device tracking and lets you check an IMEI before you buy a phone. That is a separate system with its own forms.

Where the loss came from fraud rather than from an operator's conduct — a phishing message, a wallet drained, a SIM misused after a swap — the telecom regulator is the wrong first door. That is a police matter and, in Nepal, a Cyber Bureau matter, and it runs alongside rather than instead of anything you take up with the operator.

Mis-selling, unfair contract terms and refusal to honour what was advertised also engage general consumer law. The Authority's own indexes list the Consumer Protection Act, 2075 among the acts relevant to the sector and the Consumer Protection Regulation, 2076 among the regulations, and the Act itself is published by the Nepal Law Commission. Running the consumer route in parallel with the telecom route is legitimate and sometimes faster.

Content and safety questions have their own instruments — the Authority publishes online child safety guidelines dated 2076 — and interconnection or infrastructure matters between operators are governed by their own guidelines rather than by the consumer complaint route. Knowing which instrument your problem lives under is most of the work of framing it.

One check before any of this: confirm your provider is actually licensed. Small local internet resellers running off somebody else's capacity are common, and a subscriber of an unlicensed operation has no regulatory route at all. The Authority's published ISP listings are the place to look.

Unauthorised value-added service charges are the most common and the most winnable, because the evidence is unusually clean. You have a confirmation message for a service you did not request, a series of dated charges, and — after stage one — the operator's own confirmation that the subscription existed and has now been removed. Frame it as consent: the charge was recurring, you never gave consent for it, and here are the dates and the amounts you want returned.

Data packs that vanish faster than they should are the hardest of the money complaints, because the operator holds all the measurement. Frame it around what was sold rather than around what you believe you used: the pack as advertised, the validity, any fair-use or speed condition, and a request for the usage record behind the charge. If the pack's terms differed materially from how it was marketed, that is the argument, and it is as much a consumer-law point as a telecom one.

Fixed broadband that does not deliver is a quality complaint and it needs a log, not an adjective. Dated wired tests at weekday evenings, a downtime record in days, the speed and — critically — the upload figure you were committed to in writing at sale. Ask for a credit measured in days out of service, and ask for release from the remainder of the package if the provider cannot restore what was sold.

Coverage complaints are the ones most likely to go nowhere when made loosely and most likely to be taken seriously when made precisely. A named location, dates and times, indoors or outdoors, and the behaviour of another operator's SIM at the same spot. The Authority's quality regime includes drive testing, so a coverage complaint that names a place is a complaint that can in principle be checked.

Service and number problems after a SIM change, a replacement or a transfer form a fifth cluster: a number that stops working, a service that does not follow the number, a request that was accepted and never completed. These are connection complaints in the Authority's own categorisation, which the grievance form lists separately from billing, and they need the acknowledgement or receipt you were given when the request was made.

Two of these five are money-back claims and three are service claims, and they should not be written the same way. A money-back claim is a table of dates and amounts with a total at the bottom. A service claim is a narrative of what was promised, what was delivered, what you did about it and what you want done now.

In every one of them, name the account. The number, the customer identifier, the account or subscriber code on the bill, and the address for a fixed line. Complaints stall on identification more often than on merit, and a file that lets an operator find the account in one search is a file that gets looked at in one sitting.

And in every one of them, keep the ask proportionate. A demand for compensation far beyond the money actually lost invites a refusal on principle; a precise claim for the amount deducted, or the days lost, is much harder to argue with and much easier for a mid-level official to approve.

Fixed broadband disputes have a different shape from mobile ones because there is a contract, usually a multi-month package paid in advance, often a router, sometimes a deposit, and an installation at a specific address. Almost every serious ISP complaint in Nepal turns on one of four things: performance against what was sold, downtime, the router and any deposit, and what happens when you move house or leave early.

Start by finding out what you actually agreed. The provider's published terms, the package you bought, what was written on the receipt, and any commitment on speed — and note whether the upload figure was ever stated, since it frequently is not and it is the number that determines whether working from home is viable. The Authority regulates ISPs through its 2077 internet service bylaw and the directions it issued to internet service providers in the same year, so the provider is operating inside a published framework even where its own paperwork is thin.

Downtime is the easiest thing to claim and the least often claimed. Keep the log, total the days, and ask for a pro-rata credit against the package rather than a vague goodwill gesture. Providers settle these routinely when the request is specific, and ignore them entirely when it is not.

Router and deposit disputes are the most common ending to an ISP relationship and the most avoidable. Establish at the outset whether the router was bought outright, rented, or supplied against a refundable deposit, and when you disconnect, hand the equipment back in person against a dated, signed receipt naming the device. A returned router with no receipt is an unwinnable argument six weeks later.

If you are moving, ask before you move rather than after. Coverage footprints do not match each other and a provider that serves your present street may not serve the new one, which turns a relocation into a mid-package cancellation. Ask in writing what the provider will do in that case, and keep the answer.

Where the complaint is really about being sold something other than what was delivered, the consumer route runs in parallel. The Consumer Protection Act, 2075 and the Consumer Protection Regulation, 2076 both appear in the Authority's own indexes of relevant law, and the Act is published in full by the Nepal Law Commission. Nothing stops you from pursuing the telecom complaint and the consumer complaint at the same time, and the two files strengthen each other because they rest on the same evidence.

One practical warning about withholding payment while a dispute runs. Stopping payment hands the provider a clean ground to disconnect you and shifts the argument away from its conduct and onto yours. If you must dispute a charge, pay what is not in dispute, say in writing that the disputed portion is paid under protest pending the complaint, and keep the receipt.

Finally, do not let the complaint stop you from leaving. If a provider has failed and shows no sign of fixing it, time the switch for the end of a package period, arrange the replacement connection before disconnecting where the building allows both, settle the router and deposit position in writing first — and keep the complaint running afterwards, because leaving does not extinguish a claim for money already paid for service never delivered.