Swapping or porting over your telco plan to another such as Maxis to U Mobile can be tedious. Mine was not easy because it was a supplementary plan latched onto my wife’s Maxis principal line. Maxis is still the best telco in West Malaysia having the best LTE/3G internet data coverage as such they do charge a premium for their service. The supplementary line was more for backup as I still have my work line with Maxis. Besides the supplementary at RM30 only has 250MB of internet data was not quite sufficient, so it was time to move over to another telco.

Some background about Malaysia Telcos

In Malaysia there are 4 main telcos with their own infrastructure: Maxis, Celcom, DiGi and U mobile. Maxis & Celcom has the best coverage, but between this two, Maxis has better internet data coverage and faster infrastructure while Celcom has better voice / sms coverage. DiGi claims to have good coverage but there are still pockets in outlying areas where the signal is non-existent.

U Mobile is still a relative new player and their main strength is the urban area where they have build up their infrastructure. They played a smart move to lease coverage lines with Axiata Celcom for those areas where they have no coverage while still investing in building up their infrastructure. Capex for telcos are not cheap and takes time and this strategy gives U mobile time to catch up.

So if you still wanted to make calls and send SMS text in outlying areas, you still could. However the leased coverage areas with Celcom only gives you 2G data connection. So you need a good internet speed for your apps to work such as Waze or some mapping service or watch videos, streaming music or even to have a good news browsing read, be prepared for frustration. Whatsapp texting would still be acceptable though you can forget about sending and receiving pictures and videos.

The trouble with my porting over

My swapping from Maxis to U mobile wasn’t so smooth was because it was a supplementary line. When I headed over to the U mobile center, they couldn’t extract out my line (but they could swap the entire Maxis account over but that was not what I wanted).

So the first step was to separate my supplementary line to a separate Maxis account which was easily done via a phone call. However the line was still under my wife’s name and I had to switch to their Maxis Go plan which was the minimum plan allowed (at RM50 per month). Though it took a day to separate the account, we have to find another weekend to visit the Maxis center to change ownership of the account. Changing ownership took another day. And once that was confirmed, I could drop by a U mobile center to effect the porting over (which took another day).

Counter Offer from Maxis

During the porting process, Maxis of course did not want to lose their customers, and they called me with a special offer. They offered me the Maxis One 158 plan (5GB data but they offered 6GB quota if I remembered correctly) at super low price of RM68 with no contract, which I believe was a counter to U mobile Hero P70 (7GB). It was a good offer if I was going for Hero P70, but I have no such need as I just needed something simple as a secondary line. U mobile U28 at RM28 per month with 3GB data, 50 minutes voice call and 200 SMS off-net text messaging was good enough for me.

I asked Maxis whether I could have that offer for my wife’s line, unfortunately it was offered just for my line, but not hers. So if you dare and currently not under any contract, you could attempt to port over to U mobile and see if Maxis would give you this offer! At RM68 is very much cheaper than Maxis One 128 with 3GB data and still get double the quota!

This would indeed be one of a good way to reduce your monthly expenditure cost even from RM128 down to RM68 is a RM60 a month savings! I would think U mobile was quite aggressive, as they have telemarketers calling in to my office and offering the Hero P70 plan to my company. I didn’t want to take up the offer as my colleagues and I are on the go with outstation trips, we need a good solid internet data connection while out of city areas.

It’s been a couple of days now with U mobile and so far so good.