Evidently, some of you were dissapointed that I chose to highlight the goodie bag first. Honestly, I think it was something they did well which they should be congratulated for, and it was something interesting I could prepare on short notice. The rest of this report required making sense of notes hastily scribbled. This report covers information prepared by TMNet that was presented at the Klang Valley Streamyx User Group meeting on September 15th 2006.

The TMNet people did give a detailed presentation, with more information than I actually thought they would reveal. However, they stopped short of giving out the slides.

Luckily, I can write fast and take decent notes. However, I can only verify the accuracy of these data as much as I have faith in my visual processing and note taking abilities. Some shots of the original handwritten notes are included for verification or scrutiny. Where in doubt, I have ommitted putting in whatever I wasn’t too sure of or didn’t remember. However, I hope that someone exceptionally skilled in this kind of thing might be able to decipher what I have more comprehensively (contact me for the full scans). Or perhaps TMNet will send me the slides…but I highly doubt it, nor will you see this on their website.Â

Click more to read about statistics TMNet might not like you to see!

For what is essentially the largest and virtually the “only” broadband provider in Malaysia, very little information on TMNet’s site is based on hard facts (number of subscribers, DSLAMs in place, infrastructure, etc), but instead they choose to use words like “reliable” and “fast” throughout the site, words that have very little meaning if not backed up by numbers. This recent news on the TMNet website is rather interesting though - you would think that they would rather quietly let it slide (after all, the majority of their subscribers are in the Peninsular), but I believe its a step in the right direction. (A side note: From the perspective of a web designer, I think its rather bad that they only allocate enough space on their homepage to display ONLY ONE news item at a time. Showing the most recent 5 would make a lot more sense.)

It’ll probably take more research before I can conclude anything more specific, but it basically confirms what most people here would know - TMNet doesn’t seem to have enough resources and facilities in place, and hence, we have slow and unreliable broadband connections. Only thing now is we know how slow or bad, and there’s some numbers to back it up, which doesn’t seem to have been released before.

Anyway, here it is:

TMNet Streamyx: NETWORK STATISTICS (As of Sep 2006)Â

* Due to the way the data was presented, I can’t be sure if the statistics for Peninsular Malaysia include or exclude Selangor. Can someone verify this?

Related links to the above: What is a DSLAM? How does a Cabinet Work?

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TMNet Streamyx: Statistics on number of ports and waiting list, Aug 2005 / Aug 2006

There are currently 720,000 ADSL Users of the TMNet Streamyx Service

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TMNet Streamyx: International Links

International Bandwidth is 17Gbps, and will reach 21 Gbps by the end of the year.
(Note: I’m not quite sure how this ties in with the figures above - as the numbers above both exceed 17 and 21 Gbps)

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TMNet Streamyx: Usage to use factor / P2P Abuse?
13% of basic users are downloading more than 10GB which contributed to 73% of total bandwidth. TMNet mentions that overall network utilization is at 75% on maximum capacity of 17Gbps. However due to P2P abuse, certain network elements is having a bottleneck.

Consideration is required to help 87% of low usage subscribers.

(Verbatim from their presentation.)

See Lemak Lemang on CNet for Jeff’s take on the situation.
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TMNet Streamyx: Spam, Viruses & Zombies
81% of Traffic is spam
172 mail viruses daily
265,000 new zombies (computers hijacked by malevolenet applications)
The Mocbot worm is one of the reasons for the high number of zombies. See this article on The Register for more information Mocbot.
TMNet Streamyx: New Housing Area Trivia
TM can install phone lines 3-6 months after Certificate of Fitness is issued for new buildings.Â

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TMNet Streamyx: Line Trivia

Factors that affect line speed include distance and copper characteristics. After 5 km, the signal deteriorates. The diagram seems to hint that ADSL can reach further, with less speed, however ADSL2+ can reach higher speeds, but only has a limited distance.

That’s it. Part 3 will deal with issues raised during the meeting, which were mostly relating to e-mail and coverage.

For RedesignMalaysia.com, Josh Lim