It is always a disappointment to find that the sweet juice of yesterday has gone sour. And this seems to be the most fitting analogy for some of the offers on the market and particularly the MTN mobile Internet package that some of us had grown to (patiently) love and appreciate.

Marketed as a service that was accessible from anywhere you had access to the MTN network, all one had to do is part with 85,000Frw for a modem, 1,000 for a sim card and 20,000Frw as the payment for the first month’s subscription. This seemed a fairly cheap deal for those of us with shallow pockets and a few cyber intentions.

For someone at home who used the internet to check out online news sites and read my mail, low speeds was something I had learnt to live with. I could download a PDF file and instead of staring at the screen for hours, I would go on and prepare a cup of coffee.

All I had to watch was the date when the subscription would run out before forking out another 20,000. But alas all this changed suddenly. At the beginning of June the fellows at the MTN customer service point at Union Trade Centre (UTC) were glad to inform me to change my internet settings for they had changed their billing system.

(Just like they recently forced us all onto their ‘per second’ billing.)

I am now billed for usage and this means that an hour of surfing could cost me between 500Frw and 15,000 depending on what I was doing precisely. Now on top of having to regularly check to see how much money is left, I have to give up things like adding photos onto Face-book since this will cost me a lot.

The speeds are still annoyingly slow and constant network failure seems to be a new problem to deal with. Why on earth did they change the billing system without improving their speeds and network stability?

I now spend twice as much for the same (slow) service and this comes with the additional burden of always having to remove the SIM-card from the modem to my phone to check the balance. Oh and can someone please explain why I cannot use the 13,000Frw bonus when my credit runs out?

Views expressed are those of the columnist and not The NewTimes