Streamyx is terribly slow. The only time they are fast is when they want to collect your money.

I'm really sick and tired of their greedy and "tidak apa" attitudes and nothing ever changes from last year till now. Many Asian countries have 20-100 times our Internet speed. We Malaysians are still stuck in the Stone Age. Pitiful.

Some people are saying even the 4mps package (the best they can provide)is... slow. So, you can imagine about the other packages.

Also, I notice their call center guys will "run away" by putting up auto message "Sorry all our lines are busy" if they sense you will be calling them up again and again to lodge complaints...grrr

I think they've got severe routing problems, coupled with extreme incompetence and chronic monopoly.

We've had abysmal Streamyx performance for June and July. I've called them every few days to be led on the "turn it off and on, plug it out, plug it in dance", and nothing gets better. We had 1 good day a couple of weeks ago, they must have picked the right machine to switch off for a few hours...

We upgraded to the 1Mbit/s package at the start of the year, and to be fair, they only cut us off for a few days. Given their record from the year before, I thought a few days in 6 months wasn't bad.

I was talking to my wife about moving to Petaling Jaya or somewhere last week, just so we could get Metrofon's ethernet to the home package, which seems like a 20x better deal than TM on capacity / price alone. But then, if that turned out to be no good (I have no reason to expect that it isn't excellent, it's a hypothetical argument), we'd be stuck with the one provider again.

I moved to Malaysia in 2005. I'd had BT broadband in the UK since 2000. Whenever they upgraded the equipment, they doubled my line speed for free. It was 2Mbit/s when I left, but I hear it's 5 now, for about the same I pay here for 1. In 5 years, it was down for 1 hour. I remember it was a Thursday afternoon. A BT employee in a van knocked on my front door on the Wednesday - the day before - and apologised, he'd have to disconnect the line for a couple of hours the next day.

They don't do that out of generosity. In the UK, you get a new broadband offer from a different company posted through your letterbox every week. If your broadband supplier isn't up to scratch, you can cancel your service and change to a new one without leaving your house.

It was really bad this week, so I walked around the Bandar where I live and called into the Internet cafes - there are several here. Everyone said the same "2 months lousy, no point in complaining". Tonight I was on the point of writing a blog article "Broadband so bad, I can't even order a fakn pizza", but my wife persuaded me not to - I have the visa to consider, after all.

Why do you all put up with it? I was eyeing up the High Voltage transmission towers recently, thinking there must be fibre up there, and I live near a power station, there must be an access point there. A few questions later, I find out about FibreComm. A quick search tells me:

Malaysia: Short circuit in Tenaga's telco infrastructure plan?

And then a little later:

Mission: To transform TM | Malaysian Business | Find Articles at BNET

TM buying 51% of Fibrecomm. So they were denied a license because your gov didn't want a (second?) telecomms monopoly, and then they were bought by a telecomms monopoly. WTF is that?

Do you lot have a saying in workplaces about the management "treating us like mushrooms"? It means they keep you in the dark and feed you sh!ti

Sorry - an emotional post, but what's the point in working hard on your Internet projects when you get let down so badly by inadequate telecomms?

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Sean says:
Read my blog | Ask My Spider

I obviously need friends: replying to my own post. Anybody read in the last few days on slashdot:

Slashdot | A DIYer's Quick Guide To Cheap Wireless Extension

It's not news - the Pringles cantenna and wok-fi projects have been around for years - but those community mesh networks always fall down at the long-distance connection problem. Are there any options left in Malaysia for shareable / resellable international access that don't carry RM10,000,000 in the bank + 30 years in the Internet business + 5 of someone else's uncles on the board requirements?

Just askin'!

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Sean says:
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I hear you, Seanie. We have lots of people complaining that they could not effing play their online games because the speed of Streamyx just didn't allow them to.

I couldn't fix one of my sites that was broken for hours because the speed was off, and the reason they always give me is "maintenance" or some "upgrade." But you hardly, or never see, any improvement.

As for monopoly, well I'm not bothered about that as long as the company really delivers what they sell in the first place. You could argue the same about politicians, but that's more for the political sites.

I just want a reliable connection that does what it says, is that too much to ask?

And TM, don't tell us Malaysians that the broadband is the cheapest around, cos I know better. I've seen the bills other folks elsewhere pay, and for what I am paying per month, I am getting a lot less than them. You can also check the various ISP websites to confirm.

agree with coolio,
the connection are really slow..

my option is TM agreement will ended
next year.. and after I will definitely true
signing maxis broadband..

are the speedest connection relate to the modem
kind of dsl, cable speed, bandwith internet ?

Connections were very slow last night for a few hours. It seems to be back to normal now.

Seanie, you can check whether your location is serviced by Jaring wired or wireless as a possible addition / alternative.

For DSL, I think any equipment you can buy in the shops will not be the limiting factor. I don't see anything above 2Mbit/s DSL on offer in Malaysia - is that DSL Lite or something? The limit will be the equipment TM use at the exchanges. I think most ADSL modems you can buy would be good beyond 8Mbit/s, maybe up to 24Mbit/s

If you can get ethernet to the home or fibre to the home (like Metrofon) you wouldn't use a modem / router, you'd use a plain ethernet switch or fibre transceiver. Then you can have 10/100/1000Mbit, as much as you like! It would still be 4800 baud to the USA though. I think I was getting 300B/s last night. Reminded me of sending a telex when I was a teenager working in London in the '80s.

I've been reliably getting 160kilobyte/s from sites in Brazil recently, when Maybank2u.com (Virginia, USA) and google.com have been barely loading due to dropped and mangled packets. Last night I could get nothing in Brazil, streamyx.com.my would load only slowly, but WMM was as quick as a flash, as was webmail.tm.net.my. At the start of the year, an online shop I work on had its busiest day on a Saturday, and my downloads were all from Taiwan at 160kB/s - now hardly working at all. The last few months, weekends have had hardly any traffic. Did the world change its habits, or does the network fall apart while the technicians balik kampung at the weekends?

I think the hardest part of being a TM customer (apart from unreliable Internet access) is never knowing why you had to cry into your keyboard. You listen to the voice message at the 1-300 number it says "Valued customers, please note that valid 1st April..." 4 months ago! You look on their website they say "Service announcement...20th June ... will be" Future tense, a month ago! I would feel more valued as a customer if they kept their announcements up to date. Just a little sign that someone realises they have existing customers.

It's not an independent issue. No monopoly ever gave their customers good value. There's no reason to. It was the same in the UK 40 years ago, when the government owned all the infrastructure - it was rubbish. When someone at the top decides to go for their place in history and 'be the best', maybe you get good progress for a while, especially while it's all fresh and there aren't that many people involved. But there's no reason to sustain it. Why bother? It's not like your customers will go elsewhere.

Inadequately or corruptly regulated industry doesn't mean everybody gets to be a billionaire - only one billionaire gets to be the billionaire, everybody else gets a run-down shop lot, a Proton Wira and a choice of ten million mamak stalls to drink teh tarik at.

I should go back to sobbing quietly into my keyboard... I don't like to complain - making things better is more respectable, but I feel frustrated.

__________________
Sean says:
Read my blog | Ask My Spider

I tried Jaring - was impressed by a presentation by one of their directors that I read online somewhere, can't remember his name. It was a good presentation, about what Malaysia needs to do to improve its telecomms business. Mohammad Awang ... can't remember, I'll search if anybody's interested.

I'm near Port Dickson, which I guess probably is low on any telecomms company's radar. It's not exactly Silicon Beach here. All the options I've tried have come to pretty much nothing. If a company offers wired Internet access here, they're reselling Streamyx, as far as I can see.

When Streamyx is bad, I usually just plug in my Digi handphone and use GPRS. That works great! Interesting to see all those International sites arriving in seconds via GPRS when they take minutes or fail by Streamyx. But I serve some sites from home, and Dynamic DNS doesn't seem to work with Digi's network - something about too many levels of NAT, if I remember correctly.

Even the telephone is unreliable - if I could get Dynamic DNS working over the handphone network, and I could get 56-256kilobit/s reliably, I'd throw the landline in the bin. It's not worth having for free, the way it's been for the last two months.

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Sean says:
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mine was 1MB package.
but while use speedtest.net(since their speedometer return error - always) i used to get only average : 500kbps!
it's very rare to get at 600+ kbps.

what to do?

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Personal's Blog! - Malaysian Artist!

When the streamyx.com.my speedtest worked for me, earlier this year, it was routinely showing between 1Mbit and 2Mbit - I pay for 1Mbit. I download a lot of open source software, and was getting 160kilobytes, 170kilobytes average per second from Australia and Taiwan. Since maybe April or May, Australia and Taiwan have been bad, and I could get the same speed from Brazil - so some part of the Internet was still working!

If you use an overseas speedtest, you're seeing the bandwidth that's available to you between your home and that remote site. Any link between the two points could be to blame for the reduced bandwidth. If you could find someone who lives near you, and arrange to transfer a movie or some large archive via ftp (one of you would have to run a ftp server), you could see what your equipment was limiting the bandwidth to. Even then - if you run a streaming radio client, a background software update, P2P software, any of those things (or even contention from other neighbours if there are very many using broadband on the same local network) will reduce your reported bandwidth from the speeedtest. You could boot your own PC from one of the Linux-on-CD distros, and then try the speedtest - that would rule out background processes using up some bandwidth without you knowing.

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Sean says:
Read my blog | Ask My Spider

I am using Celcom Broadband now. Using their 384kbps plan but it is faster than I was using Streamyx 1mbps. This is because Celcome3G can let you burst up to 3.6mbps when there is a HSPDA (3G) connection.

The only downside of Celcom3G is it will get disconnected during peak hours. As such you will need to reconnect a few times.

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seanie :
you dont had to tell me about basic things.
i already know about it or if any sware running on the background just can drop the speed. My test done on my best known of it. But still.. very far away of 1mbps.

speedtest.net allow you to test from the nearest server as your location, And the streamyx speedometer is annoying with their error. Some said it even FAKE!

The best top speed only can be archive when there's not much people use the line : 3a.m - 6a.m i think so.But 70% of 1mbs (700kbps) IS IMPOSIBLE for me.. nor 900kbps!

JHLC.
Celcom3g / maxis broadband speed depends on manything. But the most failure is... they block p2p, torrent bla bla bla (yes, streamyx oso block torrent now - only get 2kbps )

streamyx really need a competitor. Damn monoply!
If monopoly but service are good = Thumbs up. Else.... It's yet another POOR and BAD GOVT + Ministery of multimedia bla bla bla...

For the mean time.. Streamyx is hopeless..

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Im wait a wimax to retune back all internet connection in Malaysia..Byt, waiting is like a hell

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There is no guarantee that the WiMAX services will be better than the current one though, since all those companies who got the licenses are mosquito companies and are virtually unknown. Sigh....

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after all, I just realised that hardware
requirement are really need in making internet
speed..

with 56k modem, is average a little..
compared to ISDN, XDSL..

How to configure Internet Connection Sharing in Windows XP