A great, surprisingly unrestrained editorial in The Star. A. Asohan comments in The Star (In Tech), about the recent throttling exercise carried out by Malaysian ISPs. He starts the article with a metaphor as of such: Errant motorists are causing havoc on the roads - so, automobile manufacturers announce that they will limit the maximum speeds of their cars.
Quote: Datuk, this baby’s got a 400-horsepower, 12-cylinder engine that’ll take you from 0 to 140kph in five seconds! Oh, but don’t worry, we’re restricting its speed to 60kph … don’t want you driving too fast now, do we? A stupid idea, right? Who would want to sell a sports car with deliberately built-in speed limits? More importantly, who would even want to buy one?
Yet a similar scenario is playing itself out in Malaysian cyberspace. After years of under-achievement in our national broadband aspirations, the network service providers are taking a couple of steps back.
It also mentioned there are rumours that TMNet Streamyx might follow Maxis Broadband’s Terms of Service, which include automatic disconnection after a period of inactivity, and a total usage per month limit. (Maxis is 3GB - which is ridiculously low, considering spending a couple of hours on YouTube can easily rack up hundreds of megabytes). This aren’t unfounded rumours - why do you think your disconnections are getting more frequent? And your traffic is being throttled? Why do you think your total monthly usage is showing up in your monthly bill?
One ISP said it found out that 1% of its users were using up 30% of its bandwidth. Some will even tell you they’re trying to combat illegal downloads and online piracy.
Terms such as “traffic shaping” and others are being bandied about. This is what ISPs in other countries are doing after they found out their services had been over-subscribed. But at least those foreign ISPs had to admit their infrastructure was not up to par.
Guys. Keep making noise, and let them know that this kind of action will not be tolerated. I have it on good word that TMNet and some of their suppliers monitor this blog. We now get close to 1000 unique visits a day, btw. Nearly half is from Google, consisting of search terms such as “maxis broadband” and “tmnet streamyx”, and the other half is from people like yourselves - the bloggers, the forumites, the gamers and more.
Consider letting (links to contact pages): The Star, The New Straits Times, The Malay Mail, The Edge, Utusan and other media publications know that you’ll like to read more about RedesignMalaysia.com in the papers - we need to take this fight offline, not just on the net.
We need to do this before TMNet starts changings its monthly terms. Not after, which will be too late.
Loading ...