Life on the Spot! Life and Leisure in Doha, Qatar

Ever get tired of receiving those Advertising SMS messages on your phone from Qtel? Apparently,  a lot have been complaining and so QTEL gives us a way to unsubscribe from those nasty SMS ads:

Several comments were recently received pertaining to SMS messages regarding products, services and commercial advertising by Qtel customers. “Watani Al Habib Sabah Al Kair” program hosted Mr. Mustafa Jameel Al Qatami, Public and Community Relations Manager, Qtel, to respond to the queries. 

Mr Al Qatami said: The SMS messages sent by commercial entities informing of their promotions and discounts are dispatched based on the personal data provided to them by customers; and company name is displayed in the upper portion of the message. In order to avoid receiving these type of SMS messages, you could pursue the following steps:

• Not to provide your mobile number to businesses, in order to avoid receiving SMS promotional messages.
• If the messages have been already received, then you can contact the business house directly to request omitting your name from the list, or contact Qtel Customer Service unit on 111 to stop such messages from being sent.
• If customers wish to stop receiving all types of messages, then they can simply dispatch an SMS message to 2600 while indicating the word UNSub in the message.

Secondly, companies that are furnished with the GSM short code service to sell tones, logos and backgrounds and other downloads through the utilization of Qtel’s switchboard, it must be noted that Qtel furnishes only the required short codes to authorized merchants and it does not supply any customers’ numbers.  This protocol is commonly used in the telecom industry.     

However, since we have received several concerns regarding these authorized companies, Qtel has initiated an overall assessment to capture and penalize companies who have violated the set regulations.

With regard to the International SMS messages, they are received in a cluster manner. Companies pursue such a method by programming known switch country codes as 55/65/65/66 into their computers with a special program to access file containing mobile numbers, where the latter is keyed in a random fashion. Therefore, Qtel has no control over this. However, Qtel engineers are striving to resolve this issue through the use of advanced technologies.

Qtel is also pleased to announce the development of a web page exclusively for its customers which provides telephone numbers and web page addresses to make relevant complaints.

You reach us at www.qtel.com.qa, press “contact us” link written in English. Our complaint email address is customer.service@qtel.com.qa