On Broadband

What would you do if you’re not on vacation and you do not have a computer? Actually let me rephrase that. Can you live without your computer? If your answer is yes then stop reading. If your answer is no then let me ask you this: Are you happy with your broadband connection? If you are living in Malaysia, like me, your answer would most probably be a NO. I don’t even have to explain why, because like most Malaysians, you’re probably stuck with Streamyx. Streamyx, Malaysia’s premier broadband service. It offers unlimited access at very reasonable prices. The end.

That is what TM advertises but what it actually provides is a sub standard Internet connection that makes dial up seem pretty brisk. So once you do a Google search on the user reviews of Streamyx:

• Excellent Speeds
• Low latency
• Excellent customer service

Are among the things, which you WOULDN’T be able to find about Streamyx. Rather what you are more likely to find is something like this:

• Very slow la!
• Ping damn high
• The woman on the phone damn bo kuan
• THROTTLING
• TM nuts
• TM sux
• TM can go die


Of course once you search harder you will find that there are many other user comments regarding Streamyx and I assure you, none of them will be good ones. Go to TM’s Wiki page, (here’s the link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMnet) and you can see that despite Wikipedia’s best efforts at keeping articles neutral, this one is obviously very far from it. A fellow Streamyx user probably wrote it. At this point I probably sound like some biased jerk that is simply ranting on and on about how mediocre Streamyx is. While it is true that I am far from being satisfied with the service TM provides, the impartial fact is this; Streamyx is indeed a below par broadband service. If anyone has anything to say otherwise, please feel free to place a commentd unless of course you’re Jeremy Kung in which case if you have any comments please feel free to keep it to yourself.

If you’ve kept up with our local news, you would probably know that our government aims to have 75% broadband penetration by 2010. So far in 2008 the figure was actually closer to around 12%. I fail to see why the government wants to achieve such a high and unrealistic penetration rate. To me it is quite a hollow goal. Why? Simply because our broadband well err… sucks. At this level of quality, having 75% penetration is akin to a country with no petrol stations wanting every one of its households to have a car. Pretty pointless.

Of course I am nothing but a casual user. I do not run an e-commerce business or some other business that would require very heavy bandwidth. I'm pretty confident most of you are casual users as well, which begs the question of whether or not having better broadband is beneficial for the country as a whole inn economic terms as well as social. Malaysia has, for a very long time had the desire to be a global ICT hub. Lots of money spent, lots of infrastructure built. There’s even a township, which I will not name built for this very purpose. It starts with P. It ends with A and it’s not too far from KLIA. However, in order to be an ICT hub, what does a country need? First off you need the I, which stands for info. The government doesn’t really need to provide that. Then you need the C, which stands for communications. For that to happen you need Internet connectivity. So yes, it will be beneficial for the country economically. There’s even evidence that faster Internet speeds will improve productivity. Whether it is socially beneficial, I will not go into because social issues are always debatable.

So we’ve established that having better broadband will benefit the country, what now? Typically then, instead of having a monopoly on the last mile connections, the government should open up to other companies. Familiar sounding suggestion eh? Familiar and quite apparently unrealistic. I do have other more realistic ideas though. For one they could base their services on quotas. I mean what’s the point of having unlimited access when we are limited by throttling? Provide say 100gbs a month without throttling. Charge the subsequent bandwidth usage. And because TM believes P2P to be ‘unfair’ this would be a good compromise for both parties. I can still download but not that much. Sounds pretty fair to me. Lately Streamyx has been advertising speeds of up to 4mbps. Lets face it, they can advertise speeds of up to 100000000000gbps and its likely that we are never ever going to get it. So lets be realistic here, instead of constantly trying to woo more users by offering higher and higher speeds, just maintain the current speed of 1mpbs and actually provide it. In fact, revert back to 512kbps but provide us with good speeds, low latency and please for the love of god do not throttle us.