A hilarious picture brought to you by Digi, who have just launched rediscoverbroadband.com.my. The expression is priceless, and I really salute the artist who put it together - first thing, getting a visual reference is hard, and doing it semi-photorealistically with the expression is not easy.

Anyway, oh yeah, the packages - seems to be around the same price as Maxis Broadband. (RM128). It’s interesting that they choose to highlight also the fair usage quota of 50GB. (50GB is roughly…152 episodes of Gossip Girl in high quality video, or approximately 3413 Youtube videos).

Which is pretty decent, given that at some point my entire office used around 50-80GB a month. This is interesting - now all three telcos are using the ’sanitary pad’ style USB broadband modem! Also, there seems to be a rebranding of their internet services as ‘Digi Internet’ instead of ‘Digi Mobile Broadband’ as previously.

This doesn’t seem to have been promoted a lot - and you can only apply via the Digi SS2 outlet, strangely enough.

Btw, did you know that turtles cannot survive without their shells? A turtle without its shell is a dead turtle - it is part of them, not like a hermit crab which can survive without a shell.

Meanwhile, something suspicious is going on at P1 Wimax’s site (owned by Green Packet). Their site is interestingly, down for maintenance, with little explanation. Even the subpages indexed on Google are redirected to the maintenance page. This is the only thing you see when you go to p1.com.my:

This is either a sign that something screwed up really badly - OR - they are launching something new. Given that I’ve met a lot of the people there and they are a smart bunch, and that it is about 2AM as I post this, it’s likely they are doing some major updates to the site. Will wait excitedly and see.

Update: It’s now 4:46AM, same day, and there seems to be a new site up! I’m probably one of the first to see it.

They seemed to have merged the sites - there is no longer both a flash version and a html version (as a web designer, I have to say that those kind of arrangements are very impractical to maintain). The new site works quite well - I like the implementation of Flash here, it’s simple enough yet the little touches (slides, fades, etc) give it a nice polish.

Pricewise - P1 has a competitive low entry point with packages starting from RM49 monthly(!), but here’s what’s interesting -

- Digi is offering download speeds of 3.6 Mbps for approx RM143 (it was sneaky of Digi though to put different prices for the first 6 months and for the second 6 months.), with 50GB fair usage threshold.
- P1 is offering download speeds of 2.4 Mbps for approx RM199 a month with 40GB fair use threshold.

It remains to be seen whether:
- Digi and P1 will compete on pricing
- Or download speed

And oddly enough:

- It’s interesting that there are a lot of styling cues that are similar on both websites: Use of light grey, rounded font for headlines (VAG Rounded or Arial Rounded I believe), curved boxes, slanted fonts - these were design conventions that were established first by P1 in most of their marketing materials, especially the outdoor advertising. There is probably reason to believe this is intentional on Digi’s part, sort of a creative hijack that would work to their advantage perhaps? The turtle is a very original touch though Did I mention I like the turtle? Hahaha!

It’s interesting that BOTH of them are putting out the ‘fair usage threshold’ clearly in their materials. This may be a sign of tighter regulation on the part of the MCMC.

My thoughts? I would sign up for the first one available with decent coverage and speed in my area, regardless of RM50 or so difference

Generally, these point to good times for broadband, with Digi and P1 now set to compete. And yes, even for TMNet - I recently was invited to and attended a session to ‘revive’ the long dead TM Net User Group, and managed to have a good talk with TM Net staff, and upper management. There was also a detailed technical briefing as well as statistics shared on call centre complaints (yes, really!). There are some interesting things ahead, and I will be blogging about it soon.

Btw, I also have another blog now. If you like reading blogs, go read it.

I would now like to end with a joke…about turtles!

Q: What did the snail say when he rode on top of the turtle?
A: Wheeeeee!

(If you don’t get it, it’s okay…)