Currently, I am a proud owner of a iPhone 3G and I bought it early March 2009 and even created a iPhone/iPod application review site! Understandably, I got pretty annoyed when Singtel announce their iPhone 3Gs back in 10th June 2009.

It’s because my contract just entered the 3 months period and initially was told on the phone that I am eligible to upgrade then on the 2nd call the person said sorry cannot.

I waited patiently for another few more months and comes M1 & Starhub to comes out iPhone 3Gs with EVEN BETTER DEALS!!

Once again I tried to call Singtel, but this time round there seemed to be too occupied to pick up my call as I had waited 20 minutes and no luck.

Then I went to a Holland Village Singtel shop to find out I need to wait until 13 March 2010 (with a top up charge) before I can sign up a new contract with iPhone 3Gs!!

However with the speculation that iPhone 4G might then be out end of 2010 that means I need to wait A WHOLE LOT LONGER to upgrade my iPhone 3Gs to iPhone 4G!

Dear Telco, please give your loyal customers a chance to upgrade to the latest iPhone without stupid restriction, you can simply extend our contract period with the stipulated numbers of years or you risk losing the customer to a competitor who have nothing to lose.

Currently M1 offering rebates over 12 months period that may cover the termination penalty of $800+ bucks & of course not to mention cheaper deals with bigger data limit.

It’s obvious why Singtel is offering existing customer to a better deal of 12 GB data & a $30 data cap but the lure of a faster iPhone 3Gs & video camera functionality is also what customers are looking for.

Apparently, these companies still using the old but “proven” formula to practice their business by tying people into long contracts.

If I am to have controls over these companies, I will force them to be consumer friendly & ever forward thinking instead.

The following is what I will do

1. subcontract their call center to other countries based on their languages preferences, Chinese goes Taiwan or China, English goes India or other English speaking countries that is cheaper
2. Increase numbers of hours for call center to 24 hours a day 7 days a week
3. VOIP all call centers to be over the internet like SKYPE calls to computers instead of over the telephone network to save on telephone cost for consumers
4. Hire over 50 twitter customer relationship officers to reply to customer complaints or queries over twitter, using the search option – makes sure they know their telco short form names such as SinTel or SinkTel or ST
5. Allow existing customers to buy new iPhone 3Gs at real retail prices with NO PLANs instead of allowing outside retails to charge super high prices

The reason I am saying the above is because in the fast modern world, nobody will wait for you especially in the technology sector.

If you cannot sell hardware on demand, you lose customer…equal you lose them forever.