I was baffled by the way TM treated an OKU recently.

My friend, Peter has his OKU application filed at TM Point. The TM Point near his place was not OKU friendly and there is no provision of access for OKU! Needless to say those useless bastards who park their cars at OKU designated parking lot, and some of those lame premises who block OKU designated parking by inconvenienced them with getting someone to unlock the barricade to the parking lot.

Much to my dismay, OKU application which supposed to be given a priority was not acted upon. And worst of all, TM Lost the applicant’s documents. They have asked the OKU to go back to their TM Point to resubmit the application again! Poor Pete.

The Corporate Social Responsibility claims of TM on OKU offers are not only OKU friendly! Their first condition has shown that they are not serious in helping the OKU. Making Pete going back twice and maybe the third time is the proof that they are totally oblivion on handling OKU and their special needs.

When digi Advertise the Broadband Done right, it baffles me to think that what they are selling is just gimmicky attempts to undersell their service to the user. Claimed to be under the HSPA, Digi claims that their 700KBps speed is done right.

However, being a Process Engineer, I took out my faithful calculator and start punching in figures…

Download Speed!

700KBps is which is 5.6mbps. This is the beef. HSPA is not max at 5.6mpbs. It is supposed to be 14mbps. That is only 40% of the usable speed of HSPA.

I am also wondering about HSPA phone. Most phone in Malaysia are HSDPA and not HSPA. If these phone could work with Digi, is Digi breaching the license given by MCMC? As far as I can recall, Only Maxis and Celcom were awarded with HSDPA services. HSPA is uniquely given to Digi.

With the extreme package serving at 5.6mbps it is clearly underselling the HSPA service. (Dun give me the bull crap on network latency etc etc cause HSPA is designed to give user experience of 14mbps, not network speed of 14mbps. )

The short of it is that Digi though can deliver higher slice of the bandwidth bring the new player in the market, is chowing up more userbase into its limited gateway bandwidth and saturations will hit beyond optimum soon. Lets hoped that Digi can plan properly (between the sales and marketing with NOC) to work out the network operational issue before it hit the critical failure point.

Side Note: the short of it is that Digi is now facing Network Cascading failure in West Malaysia in area such as Negeri Sembilan, Penang, Klang etc. Hopefully these problem can be overcome soon bring the network down to below the critical point of failure.

This is how most Malaysian Telco sell their Broadband.

Hypothetically, This is the way a telco sell their apples in their basket. The One million ringgit question is that How Many Apple can a Malaysian Telco/ISP sell if they have 12 apples in their basket?

Based on my analysis, this is the figure I have got as of 1 Jan 2010.

TM Net Streamyx 1620/12
Celcom Broadband 1176/12
Maxis 528/12
Digi 756/12

**Statistics collected online. Figures above are amortisation my ratio with a variant ratio of 20%.

The golden question that follows will be are we paying an apple for an apple? How much is the megabytes we are getting worth? It all goes down to the how many time the bandwidth we are paying for is been resell. The average cost per MB can be safely ascertain as a decreasing cost. The cost per MB at bulk cost excluding gateway and local delivery network is at a mean value of USD 170 per TB. Lets say that hypothetically, the cost of gateway and local delivery network is 100 times the cost per MB. We are talking about a cost of USD 1.0017 per MB served. The rest is pure profit for the ISP/Telco. If we translate that into usable bandwidth calculation by time, Cost per Mbps is RM 2,278.476 / MB raw. on best effort basis, it should break even by overselling it 25.891772727 times. All these are theoretical figures. Looking at how the broadband is sold in the city, Especially here in Kuching, The sales oversold it by more than 1380 times per mbps available (telco A) and 987 times per mbps (Telco B).

It only took simple math to calculate how much these telco earns from one service alone. Of course USD 170 is not the cheapest /TB bandwidth available around. The cheapest goes as low as USB 60/TB.

Side notes: Why are we complaining and not others in other part of the world? Because of the economic of scale. The Scale in Malaysia could only be made economically viable by sharing to more user per MB whilst other part of the world, Bandwidth consideration is lower than that of Malaysia. The main reason for that is traffic shapes and moderatory use of bandwidth. The other limitation here is the mindset of selling bandwidth per MB. This is why I2 has not pick up in Malaysia yet as I2 network on IPv6 works without considering the limitation of bandwidth. That’s why data in GB can be transferred from one node to another across the world in less than 10 seconds.

This was sighted by my friend SB last night. Test confirmed that DNS from Celcom broadband has been hijacked and rhb.com.my was redirected to some other web site on Internet.

Of late, Celcom has really f-up on their broadband services. especially on the latency and network packet size. The irony part of this is that all calls to Celcom Careline was handled slowly and with idiocy. Celcom Careline stated that Celcom Broadband Does not uses DNS. Let see how it goes from here.

There seems to be some hiccup on Celcom3g! Speed is hell slow! latency is also slow! They have no clue on what is happening! Package subscribed is RM 98/mo.

when you hit www.gov.my, you get a notice page. What I find so 1990 about this page is that it has absolutely no artwork, no automated redirection and even a 5 years old can produce a better redirect page than this.

Here is a screen shot!

Just for note It has been down since this morning. I wonder if this is something major or just someone forgot to pay the internet hosting fee

http://files.avast.com/files/latest/400.vps

I came across this Made in Malaysia GPS VTS System. Anyone out there using this? Kindly comment.

http://www.quantumtrac.com.my