KUALA LUMPUR (April 8): Maxis Bhd chief executive Morten Lundal has apologized for the telco’s “tailored plans” which has angered some of its customers.

Addressing customers in a live video streaming from the Maxis office this afternoon, Lundal and head of consumer business Dushyanthan Vaithiyanathan said the network has been working on upgrading its plans.

“Recently, the [telecommunications] market has moved on with the focus on providing more data, we have been preparing our own offerings, but we have taken too much of time, because we wanted to add more great features than just great data.

“While we were developing these new plans, some individual customers had tailored plans delivered to them and this angered some of you and doesn’t fit to our company’s commitment of fairness and transparency,” said Lundal.

He then acknowledged that Maxis had been late in responding to data upgrades and apologized for the tailored plans.

“We were late in responding to you, and we treated individual customers differently, and for that, we are sorry, but we are also very excited about what we are doing now,” said Lundal.

Dushyanthan then explained that the telco will be launching its upgraded plans later this month, but announced free upgrades for existing customers.

“We will actually be launching our upgraded plans later this month, but I would like to now announce that all our existing MaxisONE plan customers will automatically be upgraded to much higher data quotas.. and we mean much higher for the same price.

“For example, Maxis one customers with 1GB [data quota] will now move to 5GB, and customers with 3GB will now get 8GB,” said Dushyanthan.

He added that unlike other new plans being offered in the market, these benefits by Maxis is not limited to new customers, but to all exisiting MaxisONE plan customers.

“In addition to this quota upgrades, we will be announcing further innovations that will enable our customers to do a lot more with their data on our network,” he said.

MaxisONE business customers will also enjoy upgrades. “Our enhanced plan will only be available later this month, so until then, all our MaxisOne plan customers will enjoy free 3GB of data starting next week,” said Dushyanthan.

Lundal hoped Maxis customers would be happy with the new plan, and said the telco will remain focused on its priorities of having the best network, with great customer service and value.

“We will be even better and quicker to deliver on this.. Now, with our new plans, there [has] never [been] a better time to be with Maxis, thank you for your time and we will now go back to work,” he said before ending the livestream.

There had been a social media fiasco regarding the pricing of Maxis data plans, after a social media post on March 9 by a Maxis customer on the popular forum lowyat.net went viral.

The customer had alleged that Maxis was offering “tailored deals” to customers who planned to switch networks, which were cheaper than what was being paid by other Maxis customers.

He had also alleged that users in Sabah and Sarawak were being offered data plan deals which were much cheaper than those in Peninsula Malaysia.

Maxis had responded with an April 3 posting on its website, which said some of the details in the post were exaggerated, but acknowledged that it does run targeted campaigns based on factors such as tenure, types of services used, payment history and many more.

It added that the promotional prices for its fourth generation (4G) services in Sabah and Sarawak was in conjunction with its 4G expansion into more towns in the two states.

However, the response from Maxis had somewhat angered social media users even more, who ranted on the company's Facebook page that the tailored plans for individual customers and the differential in pricing between states, were not fair.