Indosat's Internet service

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