I want to express my disappointment that Astro which has unilaterally imposed a 15% increase in its rates when its service is still not up to mark. I have noticed frequently that Astro allows frequent advertisement interruptions in most of my favourite programmes.
Whenever I catch the half-hour weekday slots of 'Seinfeld', the programme is interrupted so often with adverts that it is not funny anymore. I am paying for the air time and yet my airtime is 'sold' to other companies to advertise their products. Why is Astro short-changing me and so many other customers? Isn't this morally wrong?
When i visited my relatives in Australia, I noticed that their pay-TV does not have any adverts. In fact, it was legally wrong to do so. Astro claims it had provided new channels free to all its customers. Isn't it ironic that right after the latest introduction of the new channels, Astro decided to charge more for its service?
What's so free about that and does Astro think that its customers are so ignorant they will not notice the spin it is trying to do? I don't want to even get started on how Astro's service is interrupted whenever the weather is bad. What happened to all the hype that when the Measat-3 took off, such problems would be past?
It appears that Astro is experiencing now what I call the 'monopoly syndrome' where companies that have a monopoly of a particular service begin to move from being excellent service providers to careless ones knowing fully well that customers don't have much of a choice.
If the government had allowed more operators to provide the same service, then healthy competition would have ensured that companies like Astro do not fleece customers arbitrarily and get away with it. I would then just dump Astro and subscribe to the alternative.