Myt 512 – Upgrade / Downgrade / Forget double speed!

On the 1st December 2010, there was lot of frustration and anger among many myT users, including myself because the internet speed was not doubled, as promised by Mauritius Telecom. I phoned the Customer Care of Orange for explanations, but in vain. Following that conversation, I emailed a complaint to Orange, Mauritius Telecom, ICTA and the Competitive Commission of Mauritius.
Our Mauritian blogger on GeekScribes has written a very nice article on this topic. Please read his blog to get all the details related to this chaos among the myT customers. Carrotmadman6 has also written something which might be very interesting for you..

Today, according to an article on a newspaper, Mauritius Telecom says that those having the 512Kbps myT package (at Rs750+vat) can be divided into 2 categories :

• Those who can’t have the TV services because of a technical constraint (probably distance from the station) and
• Those who are not interested to benefit from the additioinal tv services.

The proposed alternatives

After a meeting held yesterday, the following options will be proposed to these 2 categories of customers :

1. Stay on the same package 512Kbps at the same price of Rs750+Vat (=Rs848) for as long as they wish
2. Upgrade to the myT 1MB +TV package at Rs999
3. Downgrade to the ADSL 512 Kbps at about Rs759 (VAT Inclusive)

So, logically, the price of internet has not been decreased for a portion of the Internet users in Mauritius, which is totally illegal since the decrease had been announced by the Government. Mauritius Telecom is here practicing a “2 poids, 2 mesures” towards their first myT subscribers who never wanted to upgrade their tv package.

According to me, Mauritius Telecom is not planning to maintain their initial 512Kbps package. So they are canvassing (and forcing) customers to either pay more to get a new service which they probably won’t need or simply forcing them to downgrade to another service.

Putting it in a different way, I feel that Mauritius Telecom will be categorizing its orange myT clients into 2 distinct groups :

1. Those who pay Rs848 only, unwilling to upgrade/downgrade their connection.
2. Those who pay Rs1000 (and above)

I am still undecided : I do not feel that I need more speed (and spend about Rs100 more) for my internet surfing at home. I am no mass downloader since I only read blogs and news, and do some social networking including maintaining my blog.

Once again, I repeat that the channels proposed in the myT package are completely useless (most of them), of bad sound quality and unreliable. Unreliable because most often, my Orange decoder decides to stop working for no apparent reasons. And I am not the only one who says so.

Why should I lose my time calling a customer support and being put on hold for 10mins, and finally, they promise that they will call back. No need to say, in most of the time, you never get a response back…

Meeting with Mauritius Telecom representatives

At around noon today, I got a call from a Mauritius Telecom agent. He informed me that they received my complaint regarding this myT issue and they have decided to meet me in order to discuss. From what I understood, some MT representatives will be present.

So, here is a list of questions that I am planning to ask.
Feel free to add your own in the comments section :

Questions :

• Will MyT users have to pay the Installation Fee and other charges if they want to downgrade to an ADSL?
• Fair Usage Policy? Is it still valid?
• Is Bandwidth Throttling applied (or will be applied) in Mauritius for specific sites like rapidshare?

Hope that they don’t cancel the meeting at the last moment and that the outcome of that meeting is something really constructive, instead of an attempt to do some marketing.