Poles complain about operators. We know who we care about the most

In Poland, we have four large telecommunications operators with millions of customers. Their actions do not always please customers, who in such cases may complain about the entrepreneur to the appropriate institution. We took a closer look at this topic.

Each reader of the TELEPOLIS.PL portal uses (directly or indirectly) the services of a telecommunications operator. We only exist on the Internet, so to reach us, you need to have access to this medium. In Poland, we have four large, nationwide telecommunications operators, creating the so-called The Big Four. This Orange Polska, P4 (Play network operator), Polkomtel (Plus network operator) and T-Mobile Polandwho offer their telephone (mainly mobile), Internet or television services.

Activities of the above-mentioned telecoms are not always consistent with customers' expectations or ideas. Sometimes something goes wrong between the client and the entrepreneur and something fails. Then some they send complaints to institutions whose one of the tasks is to ensure that telecommunications operators operate properly, in accordance with applicable regulations and standards. Examples of such institutions include: the office of Competition and Consumer Protection Whether Office of Electronic Communications.

One day, in the TELEPOLIS.PL editorial office, we asked ourselves a question: How many complaints actually are there and who are they most against? To find the answer to this question, we turned to the offices mentioned above. We had to wait a while for some answers, but it was worth it. Others turned out to have nothing to do with the topic, but they also have their value. I will start with the latter case.

UKE “knows that it knows nothing”

As I mentioned above, we sent the question regarding complaints against the Big Four operators, among others, to the Office of Electronic Communications. It concerned how many complaints were received by UKE about Orange, Play, Plus and T-Mobile in 2022 and how many in 2023. It seems like a simple question, but not for the office.

UKE is not able to present aggregated data to the extent you describe.

– wrote Klaudia Kieliszczyk from UKE

When we asked to what extent UKE can provide data on complaints against telecommunications operators, we learned that in none.

We cannot provide data containing the number of complaints by specific operators because we do not have them. UKE does not have an IT system that would allow collecting and processing (processing) such data.

– added Klaudia Kieliszczyk

The Office of Competition and Consumer Protection was more “effusive”

We had to wait longer for a response from the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection, but it was worth it because we received in return specific data on the number of complaints against telecommunications operators that were received by this office in 2022 and 2023. I have collected them in the table below.

Telecommunications operator	Number of complaints
	in 2022	in 2023	year-to-year change
Orange Polska	approx. 370	approx. 370	–
P4 (Play)	approx. 320	approx. 440	+120
Polkomtel (Plus)	approx. 200	approx. 200	–
T-Mobile Poland	approx. 180	approx. 220	+40

At the top of the podium it turned purple

As you can see, the number of complaints against operators submitted to the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection is not very high. Especially if we compare the data in the table above with the number of customers of individual telecoms. However, some trends are visible here. For example, this in 2022, most complaints concerned Orange Polska. Interestingly, their number in 2023 remained at approximately the same level, which caused the orange operator to drop to second place in this “ranking”. He overtook the Orange team Play network operatorwhich was last year as many as 1/3 more complaints than a year earlier.

We asked about this situation at the Violet team's press office, allowing ourselves to suggest that maybe there was “something wrong” with this operator. We didn't have to wait long for an answer.

The increase in the number of cases you are asking about is a logical consequence of the merger of Play with UPC. As a result, the number of clients served by the company and the scale of cases increased significantly. Play is also the largest mobile operator on the market, which also affects this issue.

We pay attention to the proportion – complaints concern less than 0.002% of all customers. Nevertheless, we try to keep them as few as possible.

So there are definitely no grounds to claim that there is “something wrong” with the Play network.

– wrote Krzysztof Olszewski from Play

There have also been more complaints about Magentowe

In 2022, the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection received the fewest complaints on T-Mobile Poland (looking only at Big 4 data). A year later, these complaints were already noticeable, because… over 20% more. Due to this, Magent has overtaken the network operator in our “ranking”. Pluswhich saw a similar number of complaints in 2022 and 2023.

We also asked the T-Mobile network operator to comment on the increase in the number of complaints submitted to the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection against this telecom.

The voice of our customers is the most important to us, which is why we listen very carefully to all the comments we receive from them. Also the negative ones, which help us find areas of activity that need improvement and allow us to constantly improve the quality of our services. Thank you very much for all of them.

However, it is difficult for us to comment on this data, especially since we do not know how many of these reports were found to be justified. Sometimes even one complaint may signal a problem or initiate the Office's proceedings, and other times many more may be considered unjustified.

We currently have almost 13 million customers, which means that each month we receive not hundreds, but hundreds of thousands of different signals from them – positive and negative – which we are able to analyze very thoroughly. These data show that the number of complaints in 2023 has decreased significantly compared to the previous year. And we are doing our best to ensure that there are even fewer such reports in 2024!

– said Jakub Chajdak from T-Mobile

We also keep our fingers crossed that there will be as few complaints as possible about T-Mobile Polska and other operators in 2024. But any decline in their number should be the result of telecom operators' efforts to ensure that everything works properly.