Yesterday I handed in my termination application form and returned my broadband modem to Telekom. I’ve been using Telekom’s Unifi service since I moved in to my current home in 2011 so you could say I was a pretty loyal customer. I never had any problems with the service – my download/upload speeds were good enough for gaming, streaming and torrenting. The network was rarely down – I didn’t have any issues with the service at all.

So why did I terminate my account? I was happy with my internet service. It was Telekom’s very own marketers that pushed me over the edge. About a month or two ago some dude called me up and told me that because I was a long-time customer, I was eligible for a “cheaper price promo”. I told him that was great, and I was interested in switching to it. But he told me that I couldn’t just switch my account to that new price – I had to cancel my account and sign up for a new account to get this new price point. We got into a debate over how absurd that was and I ended the phone call with him after about 20 minutes without agreeing to take this “promo”. Immediately, I went online to do some research about TM’s current price offerings.

My plan then was RM179/month for 30Mbps (which was supposed to be upgraded to 100Mbps for free this year but due to my condominium’s network cable limitations, it wasn’t going to happen) – a plan that they don’t offer anymore (you have to Google to get to this page, it’s not even linked from their homepage – why is it still up?). If you check their website, they currently offer: RM129/month for 100Mbps (unlimited) or RM79/month for 30Mbps (limited to 60GB a month). This meant that I was paying an extra RM50/month for my current plan. Now, who in their right mind would want to do that?

My 2-year contract had already long expired – couldn’t they have just reduced my monthly fee to match the current price? Why did I have to cancel my account and sign up for a new one just to pay the correct price? They aren’t selling my old price plan anymore, it doesn’t make any sense that I have to keep paying for it since I was no longer bound to a contract.

I wrote them a lengthy email about my situation and they didn’t answer my question. They kept harping on the fact that I had to cancel my account to get the correct price. They marketed this ‘new’ price as a promotion. How the fuck is it a promotion if it is just the correct price for a service I’m overpaying for? If I had to guess, they probably wanted me to commit to another 2-year contract, or they wanted me to contribute to their number of sign ups for the year.

Since Telekom wanted me to cancel my account anyway I decided it would be a good time to give Time a shot. I signed up for an account over one afternoon at Seng Yip’s house (the sign up process is a stupidly simple and quick process, big props to Time for making the transition so easy) and scheduled a date for them to come over. That day was yesterday and after successfully upgrading to Time, I drove to the Telekom center nearby my house to terminate my account.

I hope Time lives up to its reputation – based on my friends’ experiences I’ve made the right choice (and for the past 24 hours I’ve been very very pleased with it). When the billing date comes around, I’ll be happy with the lower price and the fact that I won’t be charged for a service I never use (looking at you HyppTV).

Also, this switch comes one year after I shut down a Time telemarketer almost a year ago. Does this mean his call worked?