Airtel Ghana says it has given its customers a subscription-based free voice, internet and SMS access to compensate them for the March 10, 2016 network interruption that affected some customers.

The company said the compensation package, dubbed "Airtel Gift", offered all customers the opportunity to enjoy free voice, data and SMS from 8am to 12 midnight on Friday 11th March 2016.

But customers were required to subscribe to the compensation package via the short code *202# before they could enjoy.

Airtel Ghana Marketing Director, Rosy Fynn explained that the network interruption was caused by a technical hitch during a routine network upgrade.

She expressed her sincere apologies to customers for the outage and thanked them for their patience and loyalty, and also assured them of Airtel's commitment to high standards of service delivery.

"As a network that believes in delivering unmatched quality services to customers, we will continue to work tirelessly to maintain the trust customers have in us," she said.

Rosy Fynn urged customers to contact Airtel’s call centers on 100 for any assistance.

Customers react

Meanwhile, Adom News spoke with some Airtel customers who said they did not see the text message inviting them subscribe to the compensation package, while others said the idea or subscription put them off.

Kofi Assan from Nungua, for instance, said "I did not see any message from Airtel because even on March 11, 2016 I didn't have service on my phone."

Mavis Sowah of La, said she saw the message but she was completely put off by the invitation to subscribe by midnight so she did not just did not subscribe.

She argued that if Airtel really wanted to compensate customers for the outage they could have either identified the affected persons and compensated them, or just made the compensation open instead of on subscription basis.

Meanwhile, Horst Koranteng of Manet Palm Estates at East Legon said he and his wife subscribed to the compensation package but wondered why they had to subscribe instead of just getting it automatically.

Horst also said the Airtel service in the estates has been really bad for a while now so even the compensation they subscribed to was not relevant because till date "we can't browse and voice call are bad and they keep dropping."

Airtel responds

Airtel Ghana's Head of Corporate Communications, Richard Ahiable said they use all platforms including radio stations across country, social media platforms and even direct SMS to all their over four million customers informing them about the compensation available for subscription.

He said they decided to open it to all customers because identifying only affected customers would have been very tedious and time consuming.

Ahiable however did not say why they chose to make it on subscription basis instead of just automatic compensation.