The Malaysian Communication and Multimedia Commission has released a mandatory standard for Quality of broadband service in Malaysia starting 1 January 2008.

Here are the conclusions(Applies to all ISPs):

• 80% of installation orders must be fulfilled within 24 hours from the time and date requested by the customer.
• 80% of service restoration must be completed within 24 hours from the time and date requested by the customer.
• 90% of billing complaints must be resolved in 15 business days of receipt of the complaint.
• Network latency to the nearest edge node(BRAS), shall be no more than 85ms(95% of the time)
• Bandwidth utilisation between the user and the nearest edge node of the regional broadband network(BRAS) should be no less than 80% of the subscribed level(95% of the me)-it means local sites will load faster
• Packet loss should not exceed 1% between the user and the nearest edge node of the regional broadband network(BRAS)

BRAS-Broadband Remote Access Server

On top of all theses mandatory standards, all ISPs must produce a report to MCMC every six months.

Mandatory Standards for Quality of Service(Broadband Access Service)-PDF file

The question is:

• What if the customers are still not satisfied on the service offered? (MCMC will be judging the service based on the report produced by the ISPs, what about consumers?)
• Do I still pay RM77 when service is always not available, or when the technical guy is taking his sweet time to come over to my place?
• What happens to the ISPs if the mandatory standards are not fulfilled?
• Why “best effort” still remains? Does MCMC support these terms?
• Why wait until January,2008? Does it mean that we will suffer until then and no action can be taken on the ISP?

Comments are most welcomed.

Update: You can read more on this at : http://forum.lowyat.net/topic/486176

I got notified this from a reader, and managed to confirm that eB Technologies is no longer taking new residential signups, and will only be doing corporate broadband for the time being. From the looks of it, a representative said it was “temporary”, but has not given a timeline.

They will continue to serve existing customers though. I wonder why they decided to do this - is it that hard to make a profit from residential broadband? That being said, I sympathize with them - having to compete with Streamyx’s marketing budget (billboards, tv commercials, direct mail, and all) is not easy.

A consortium of Malaysian ISPs including founding members TM, Jaring & AIMS with peering members Maxis, Time, Digi, Nasioncom, Heitech Padu, MyKris, Airzed, Extreme Broadband, VDSL, EBTech, Freenet, Bizsurf, Paneagle and CNX have come together to launch MyIX - The Malaysia Internet Exchange.

What is MyIX anyway? A summary…

(more…)

We’ve made even more changes to the map, adding in AirZed WiMax and eB Technologies MyWave. Yes, the shapes are really that odd (at least that’s what we’ve managed to get from their site). Chances are that they cover slightly more, but it was cropped off from the map, so we’ve transposed it exactly as shown on the site. You can see the original coverage pages at the following urls: AirZed WiMax Coverage and eB Technologies MyWave.

Any suggestions on who we should add next? In general, we aim to list the providers with the most significant coverage first, followed by the rest.