Indosat's Internet service

Indosat seems to be catching up with Telkom in terms of greed and inefficiency. For the past four months I enthusiastically promoted Indosat to my friends and associates as a welcome alternative to the monopolistic technology repressing practices of Telkom, whose expensive, substandard Internet services have frustrated us for years.

I have yet to receive a bill from Matrix even though they have two addresses as well my e-mail address, I simply pay what they ask at their local office where they too cannot provide me with any kind of bill.

I am told that they cannot activate my MMS service and no one knows how to configure my Outlook Express so that it will work through their service. None of their telephone representatives or any technicians from any of three offices have been able to help.

Indosat's Matrix service is a slow GPRS internet connection and requires a great deal of time and patience for even the most basic Internet usage, but at the current price is a pretty good deal for those of us who live in remote areas with few alternatives for service.

Now it seems that Indosat's "bait and switch" tactics are about to be revealed as their Matrix customers are going to be informed that they will soon have to pay four times as much for a service inferior to the one that they had contracted. I am being given the alternative to continue paying the amount that I contracted with a reduction of services to 5 percent of what they were previously.

So now, in addition to getting bad service for a partially functional product, are Matrix customers going to pay an outrageous price and have our services drastically reduced? Why are the people they depict in their ads smiling the way they are? They must not know that the rest of the world is enjoying far better service for a lot less money.

SCOTT RASMUSSEN Bali