Everytime you visit your international airport near the security frisking area you can find a bunch of guys with Matrix Cellular signage offering lucrative international calling at rock bottom and down to earth prices.
They may be offering you prepaid(pay as you go) o r postpaid (contract) plans but some how even you insist on prepaid by hook or crook they try to get the SIM sold on postpaid only. This is the only efficiency of Matrix Cellular workforce.
Then comes a series of shortcomings which they will not(and perhaps can not) work upon to improve.
1) The call rates are never cheaper as they claim at least with respect to US, UK, Thailand and Australia. The most cheapest option would be purchasing a local SIM at the destination and using it.
If you are scared of purchasing a local SIM, your current country’s SIM (Airtel, Vodafone etc in India) with an appropriate International Roaming top up would be significantly cheaper, cost-effective and reliable than Matrix Cellular.
2) More often, Matrix Cellular SIM is a botched one because they do not have good tie-ups and hence data quality and voice quality is pathetically bad. Also the customer care who is sitting in a junk call center in India would have no idea of how to fix it and they would just put you on hold and run away.
3) The billing team of Matrix Cellular is another set of unscrupulous people. If you have given a standing instruction they debit the instrument beyond the permissible options often quite illegitimately even when the charges are not appropriate.
4) On return from the country if you try visiting a Matrix Cellular office to surrender the SIM and settle the amounts, they refuse to entertain you telling that you need to register a request and some one would visit the address to pick up the SIM and form.
However, weeks or months no one would bother to visit you. There is a fine-print here. The account will keep running till you surrender. And hence they try and pretend that you have used the connection internationally even when you have returned back to your country.
5) Matrix Cellular seems to be having an unholy nexus with a few collection agencies around the nation’s capital who pretend to be counsels for them sending out seemingly fake summons in an attempt to scare the customers to cough out their hard-earned fortunes to them.
When challenged with the itemization of the charges and service requests tendered, they would never be in a position to answer the same and your queries would remain unresolved.
6) Even if the query is routed through our telecom regulatory authorities and department of telecommunications the same remains unanswered by the team for several weeks.
Going by the serious functional, financial, integrity and ethical issues with Matrix Cellular I suspect whether these guys also have a significant percentage involvement in our telecom rackets or at least the blessings and support of those scam-tainted ministers.
I think not just the Government of India but every country should place a total embargo on Matrix Cellular provided services within their respective territorial jurisdictions.