Mike Caldwell Vodafone’s head of communications admitted the company had sold too many phones over Christmas and was struggling

Mike Caldwell, Vodafone’s head of communications, admitted the company had sold “too many” phones over Christmas and was struggling to keep up with calls from customers. He said Vodafone had subjected customers to “totally unsatisfactory” delays in dealing with repairs after being overwhelmed by demand.
There was a threefold increase in total mobile phone sales in the UK in the last quarter of 1998 compared with the previous year, with some 2.5 million new customers.”On Christmas Day alone we connected more customers than we did in the first four months of 1998, and in the last quarter gained 933,000 more customers,” he said.The rush meant subscribers were having to wait longer to have payment queries answered, and faced delays of several weeks for simple repairs such as the replacement of faulty microchips.Vodafone confirmed it was recruiting 500 staff for its new service centre in Birmingham, which is to open in March.Oftel, the phone regulator, said the number of complaints it has received had increased and it was talking to the “big four” operators – Orange, Vodafone, Cellnet and One2One – about how they can improve. It is due to publish its first report on the number and nature of complaints in early summer.An Orange spokesman said customers were having difficulties contacting the company, it regretted the inconvenience.. ON 12 OCTOBER this year – give or take a week – the human population of Earth will reach six billion.

It has risen by a billion in just a dozen years, and almost quadrupled during the 20th century. The data was presented at a conference yesterday in The Hague as delegates from 180 nations gathered in the Netherlands for the United Nations Hague Forum to debate how to slow the rising tide of human numbers which is still threatening disaster across much of the globe.
Earth has never been so demographically divided. At one extreme, wealthy Western nations where fertility has been falling worry about the strains on their economies imposed by a fast-growing bulge of elderly, retired people. A group of Eastern European nations and Russia have seen a dramatic decline in birth rates; if the trend continues their populations will fall fast.At the other extreme is a clutch of developing nations which already rely on food imports and seem entrapped by a combination of poverty and high population growth and density.Lacking resources, and with nearly all their fertile land in use, the prospects for places such as Bangladesh, Pakistan, Egypt and Haiti appear bleak.Furthermore, an endless cycle of wars in developing countries is hurting women and drowning out the message that family planning brings social benefits, the conference was told.”It is pointless to talk about family-planning issues or reproductive health when women are in situations of conflict and genocide,” said Nana Rawlings, the wife of Ghana’s President, Jerry Rawlings. Goals, such as universal access to reproductive health services by 2015, were meaningless when women had to struggle to survive, she argued in a keynote speech.Globally, the growth in human numbers is slowing.

Even so, the population will reach 8.9 billion in 2050, according to the latest forecast of the UN Population Division. And it will not level off until around 2200, by which time there will be nearly 11 billion people alive.The slowdown is happening because women in more and more countries are able to have fewer children, and are choosing to do so. There is a web of causes – higher standards of living, greater access to contraception, changing attitudes and declining infant mortality which gives mothers more reason to believe their babies will survive.But big families and overpopulation still stunt hundreds of millions of lives across the world. The Hague Forum, which brings together 1,500 delegates from governments, charities, campaigning groups and academia, is trying to reach agreement on what more needs to be done. Hilary Clinton, the wife of the United States President, will speak there today on her way back to Washington from King Hussein’s funeral in Jordan.”Before the dawn of the next millennium, the six billionth human inhabitant of this planet will be born,” the Dutch Health Minister, Els Borst-Eilers, said in an opening speech.