Filed Under (General) by pierce on November-7-2008

Dear Careline and Celcom CEO,

I wish to express my dismay over the design of your web site which is too heavy to load even with your so called Celcom Broadband. Though its nice to look at with the all blue themes, its navigation is of 1980’s and is so backdated. Plus the total download of more than 11Mb for a clean load is really daunting and discouraging. What more to say user friendliness that is next to nothing.

You strife to call yourself the most experience network but in fact, you are the least accommodating one. All that you have done for customers is headache and more headache. I still recalled during the first day of Celcom Operation here in Kuching, I was among the first of your reseller and that was the time celcom can do everything the customer have asked for. However, nowadays, that sort of service remains just a vivid memory of history that was all so true.

I am currently a heavy celcom user and I found myself in the situation liken to an ASTRO subscriber. The condition of the package that I have subscribed to has changed numerous times without any sort of notifications and occasionally, I have to deal with the bombardment of unsolicited SMS from Celcom. Even more painful, Celcom has short sell me on the SMS services on services that has violated the MCMC guidelines which I had brought to the attention of the CFM several years ago.

To top it up, Celcom has blamed countless problem it doesn’t want to solve on parties other than Celcom. Probably this is the Standard Operation Procedure celcom gave to VADS for the call center operation. Some complaints of mine was left unanswered. Of late, I have lodge a complaint to careline and all I get was a beef of buying time for celcom asking me to try it in another hour whilst I have told the telephonist that it has been several hours of such situations and forced her to lodge a call. However, I would see that she did not follow any procedures as there were no follow up since.

My inquiries of merging all my Celcom service in a consolidated billing (all in one bill, not all in one billing address!) has until now, remains an untold story. Though there were several calls from the center telling me this and that but no one can offer me a true consolidated billings and I was told to wait for “Management Decision” on that. This is really irony in situation where even your CSM would require Management decision for such a small thing that usually would not require any executive order to carry out in other companies such as Telekom and etc.

Celcom has also short charging the customer based on my analysis. Firstly, Celcom offers any calls that goes to the telemanager to be FOC provided that the call hung up within 4 seconds of the call. I have notice a change in the timing of the telemamager. The first two second of the telemanager message is blank and the hang up command, if a call is in telemanager, took more than 2 seconds whereas if a call gets through, the call is answered immediately and the hanging up is immediate. This is also on top of the 250ms delay for feedback cancellations; thus giving the user less than 100ms to hang up upon hearing greeting message.

I was amazed by how much Celcom has deteriorated its services since the start in 1992 here in Sarawak and I think celcom should do something about it before all its customer started to run away to other telco.

I do sincerely hoped that Celcom can exert to excel rather than derailing its service to such extend that customer would think low on your service. Please proof that you are the “Most Experience Service Provider” and not the public perception of being the “Worst Service Provider” in the market.

Cheers,

Chairman
TM User Group
Prof. Dr. P Wong
Now, Faith is the substantiation of the things hoped for, the conviction of
the things not seen. -- SP


Filed Under (General) by pierce on October-23-2008

It seems that most of the removable media seems to quit about the same day yesterday. I lost 1.3GB of pictures and documents and several of my colleagues has problem with their cameras’ removable media.



Filed Under (General) by pierce on September-21-2008

Yahoo has just changed their mind in handling their search crawler. Thus has cause a sort of DDoS attack pattern from their slurp servers. Anyway, a lot of gateway appliances has started to block all yahoo’s ips due to their stupid move.



Filed Under (General) by pierce on July-17-2008

I am forming a TM User Group for round 2. The first TM user group as carried out by Michael Lai prior to his exit from TM Net has been iced since his exit. I felt that the user should know the inside of the TM operation and with my recent encounter with TM, I have managed to secure a communication channel with their CSM Manager to properly address any technical issues with them directly. In order to share this communication channel, I have with their permission, to reactivate and restart the formation of the TM User Group.

To see this happen, I am going to start it off from my home state here in Sarawak. In the next six months time, and if God is willing, the new user group will be formed and will hold office.

New here is the beef. This group is not a group form by TM as compared to the first TM user group. This group will have a proper communication channel to CSM as assured by the CSM Manager during a discussion. Here is a call for forming the pro-tem committee for the user group. If you are interested please sms me your email address to tm@kuchingfest.com or sms me your email address to 0198886577.

Also I have put in place a new forum for the TM User Group. http://forum.xqurl.com



Filed Under (Internet) by pierce on July-17-2008

I’ve come to known from VADS that most of the people in the call center are not IT graduates. Of course in places like Kuala Lumpur, People with university degree will not go for a low paying job such as those in a call center. Suffice to say, the knowledge in handling the calls on behalf of TM will be considerably unmatched due to the fact that the caller might have more than enough knowledge that the call center telephonist has.

Furthermore, being in the call center, its a stressful job. All the caller who has called up are already furious of the service outage as they need some help from the service provider. It is a psychological battle for them to be bombarded on behalf of their company’s customer. Those who persevered the first psychological six months and survived will be considered to be supervising the newly recruits.

There are more than this to a call center. With the limited knowledge of the call center, it is hard for the call center to manage the customer’s customers. Even though they might be able to handle calls and manage the HR crisis well enough, it is always though to get through the psychological barriers of the callers when the callers knowledge outrank the knowledge of those in it.

It is odd to concede that when a call came from one area of the country futed with the same type of problem, the crisis management process should have been triggered. I am taking the crisis situation in Sarawak that happened earlier this week on Sunday morning at approximately 8:15am. Some part of the edge connection from Sarawak to the internet pool in TM Net has malfunctioned. Calls in the hundreds started to come in from Sarawak and statistically, that should be an indication that the problem has started. However, on Monday morning, Crisis Management procedure has not been triggered and call center only acknowledged theĀ  problem when I called up and ask if there is anyone looking into the problem. They have acknowledged that the call center does registered a large numbers of calls. Further escalated the problem, the principal company has flagged this as an issue and engineers were flown in to Kuching immediately to fix the problem. I was in contact with the engineers until the problem is fixed at 11pm last night.

Further to this, I felt that TM should allow some knowledge sharing to be made available and some strong technical backup from TM should be participating in the knowledge sharing realm to provide hedges counter measures to all these bad publicity.

I will host this knowledge sharing and I hoped TM will appreciate this once it is there.

URL: http://forum.xqurl.com

p. s. I am also looking for moderators for the forum please email your cv to me



Filed Under (General) by pierce on July-15-2008

I think if we would to appreciate the pricing for Streamyx, being low and affordable (Eventhough the service is not up to the acceptable standards) We would not have thank TM for it. The correct person to thank for is Tun Mahathir. It was in a budget announcement right before his retirement that he cut the Streamyx packages price into half.



Filed Under (Rants) by pierce on July-15-2008

It seems that without the Load Balancer, Surfing is smoother.



Filed Under (Rants) by pierce on July-15-2008

It seems that the Load balancer has been … ehem ehem… unplugged.



Filed Under (Rants) by pierce on July-14-2008

Its a Black Monday for TM Net. Whole Sarawak is under duress. So far, the recovery is only up to the following:

1. Malayisa Web Sites
2. Northern Exchange to Indochina
3. Northern Asia
4. Western Seaborne of Northern America Except Alaska
5. Mid-continental except Richmond
6. UK Part of UK

Confirmed outage of services
1. ICMP
2. IGMPS
3. UDP
4. TCP D. ACK Packets
5. All H.323 Packets

Confirmed nonworking web sites
1. Europe
2. Eastern Seaborne of North America
3. Australia & New Zealand
4. Belgium
5. India
6. The other part of Part of UK and Ireland,
7. South America
8. Africa
9. Middle East
10. Arab Peninsular
11. Kelana Jaya TM Net Data Center
12. Brickfields TM Net Data Center
13. CyberJaya TM Net Data Center
14. Antartica Station

Recovery work is still in progress



Filed Under (Rants) by pierce on July-14-2008

Someone from TM Net has informed me that the packet lost problem in Sarawak in under rectification. TM Net flown a team of experts from KL to Kuching this morning to fix the problem and they are still at some place called Tanjung something…

Anyway, I am waiting for the leads technical from the team to give me a call before I update on this blog again.