Telekom Malaysia, Malaysia leading ISP Heading As the leading integrated Telecommunications Company in Malaysia, we aim to deliver cutting-edge communications, information and entertainment services. Explore our profile to find out more about who we are and what we stand for (Telekom Malaysia Sdn Bhd, 2014) What I want to say here is I do not fully agree with this statement because it doesnt meet my expectations according to the value I paid. Since the day of subscription, I have a lot of bad experiences when spending my time in the cyberspace due to the poor quality of their connection. In my opinion most of the problems I faced are man-made error instead of system error. This two terms will be explain later in this article. I can still vividly remember that I was not given the correct speed based on the package I subscribed in my early stage of using broadband connection. However I didnt notice it because I was still 12 at that time neither did one of my family members due to their illiteracy about computers and internet. I found out after I entered secondary school when I exposed to the subject called science where I learned prefixes. I only realized that 1 megabit per second is equivalent to 1024 kilobits per second and also equivalent to 128 kilobytes per second. Until now I regret that I didnt know this earlier. My English is not very good at that time but I still managed to write several emails to TM. It took them several months to rectify this issue. Somehow I am wondering are they bullying me with this kind of efficiency. Even though after that I got the correct speed, but my Internet experience is not always a good one. I faced a lot of issues when I am using the Internet such as interrupted streaming that supposed to work best for my connection, slow download speed, trouble accessing international hosted websites, blogs that mentioned bad things about them and etc. I thought the internet traffic is congested during that time but later I found out that this problem is not that simple that what I thought of. All of these problems were ignored by TM until I raised it to the management level. The same problem came back after few weeks, months if I am lucky. I reported it again and the same thing keep repeating until I have to bring this issue to Malaysia Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC). This time my smooth Internet experience last for a longer period. However the problem is back again after sometime until I really fed up with it.
Then later as I grow older, I realized that they are actually exercising bandwidth throttling and limitation after some research and experiments. They did that just to force you to spend more money and upgrade to a faster internet package which is much more expensive which you cant afford it. I can still remember what the staff from TM spoke to me over the phone that afternoon. Kalau you nak lebih, bayarlah lebih.. It means pay more if you want more. Hey! come on this is really unethical to force customer to pay more to continue their smooth Internet experience. For your information, I receive quite a number of calls asking me to upgrade my connection to a higher speed and it is really annoying. I know they will limit my bandwidth again even though I upgraded to force to upgrade again. I have no other options because TM has the monopoly role in the country. Although I am not a Unifi user but I know Unifi users faced a lot of similar problems. Only users who are aware of it will report this issue while others will think that it is normal and ignored it that leads to the problem become unattended for a long period. Based on my hypothesis after research and experiments, a lot of Internet issue is generated by TM on purpose. Sometimes I think TM management is bullying those people who are computers and Internet illiterate. I also disappointed with this act because for me it is discrimination. It doesnt mean that you cannot have better Internet experience just because you are poor! For me, they did all these things just because of profit!
Lately, I actually faced this streaming issue on a lot of video streaming sites except for those popular ones. My hypothesis is they actually did bandwidth limitation except for popular sites to prevent detection. TM actually denying this but I know they are lying. I reported this issue again after I came back from Kampar. I find that the problem is resolved partially. I faced the same problems after 11 am. Before that I faced it all day long since the month of December. A senior engineer from the network team told me that it is none of their control because there might be a congestion at one of the loop. I am back after 3 months and realized this problem still persists and I reported it again and this issue is partially resolved. Therefore I really suspect there is something suspicious inside TM.
The Internet speed in terms of the price among countries in the world ranking is out recently. I was really embarrassed to found out that Malaysia actually had worse ranking that some of the third world and poor countries. In my opinion, access to good internet connectivity is responsible for a country growth in all aspects because it is a pathway to enter into the cyberspace without hindrance. I hope the bad ranking can be a wakeup call for the government to solve this issue.
References Telekom Malaysia Sdn Bhd. (2014). About Us. Retrieved from Telekom Malaysia: https://www.tm.com.my/AboutTM/OurHeadquarters/Pages/Home.aspx
My Proof that TM is exercising excessive bandwidth limitation to cheat their customers. There is an online tool that enable user to do simple test to know did their ISP shape their traffic. I run it several times and got positive results.