Dear Editor,
I was very interested to read Billy Sheal’s comments about his experiences with True Move. Is there any farang in this country who is happy with their service? I haven’t found any.
The staff are generally discourteous and will more often than not ignore farangs at the front of the queue in favour of a Thai stood behind. Considering that the service is favoured more by farangs than Thais it astounds me that the staff that they employ generally have very little or no command of the English (or any foreign) language.
We too had a similar situation to that experienced by Mr Sheal. When we moved here, just over 4 years ago, we purchased our own True Move decoder and dish and subscribed to the Gold package. Although the quality of choice of programmes being transmitted left a lot to be desired we found the service to be generally adequate for our needs. I would hesitate to improve on this analogy as the quality of the picture was not to the standard that I was used to in England, but there we were spoilt with Sky, of course.
We paid our subscription monthly - generally getting frustrated at the Thais being allowed to jump the queue at Tesco Lotus - until one day last year when they calmly turned to us and announced that our decoder and dish were now obsolete and we needed to buy new ones. We returned to the shop where we bought them, but they could do nothing. Neither could the True Move shop opposite Big C extra on Pattaya Klang so, after weeks of frustration, we eventually succumbed to buying a new decoder and dish.
So, the engineers arrived with the new equipment and immediately advised us that it was a waste of time fitting the new dish, as our existing one was identical. A good investment, that, I thought - the new dish is still left on the ground at the side of our house where they dumped it!
Then they connected the new decoder and the picture was very poor, in fact totally unwatchable on most channels. I asked why, if our dish was OK, we couldn’t simply continue to use our original decoder, as that had always produced a reasonable picture and, despite the engineer’s insistence that it was not possible, I did eventually persuade him to reconnect it. Then, as if by magic, he produced a card to insert into our old decoder to receive all the channels. Perfect! - well not actually perfect, but certainly acceptable. But it was not possible for us to do that. It would appear that that was far too obvious a solution to the problem. The only solution, he said, was to upgrade to an HD box, which he assured me would improve the picture on all the channels.
So, the next day we had the HD box installed. We received very good pictures on the 3 HD channels - Truesport 1, HBO and, inexplicably, ‘Coffee Master’, which was just cameras sited in a coffee shop! - a bit like Lin Ping panda channel! So we had 2 watchable channels and there was no improvement to the others. As True Move were incapable of sorting out the problem we ceased paying our subscription - after all, the TV remained switched off as we only had blurred pictures to watch. We were subsequently cut off and received letters threatening to sue us for payment. My letters to the Customer Services Dept and the managing director in Bangkok didn’t even receive the courtesy of a reply and we have remained at a status quo for almost a year now.
I too am looking for a suitable TV service Mr Sheal, so if you find one will you please pass on the information to me.
Phil Barker
