The Kuala Lumpur Traveler

I read yesterday’s news about the National Broadband Implementation Plan with much interest. The government is targeting to have 50% Malaysian household to have broadband servcies by 2010. I hope the gorvernment, or the party entrusted by the government, would think about the implementation in great detail in order to achieve the ambitious plan, especially in forming the partnership with either private or public sector.

Although there are a number of servcie providers offering broadband in Malaysia, most of them still rely on the infrastructure provided by Telekom Malaysia which also offers its own brand of broadband service Streamyx. Sadly to say, the quality of these services leaves much to be desired.

In Malaysia, the people is left with only one choice when it comes to broadband and the choice is none other than Streamyx. The monopolistic nature of the business model adopted by Malaysian authority has made Telekom Malaysia a very profitable company but that comes at the great expense of the consumers who have to suffer a lot due to poor quality of the broadband services itself, not to mention the level of customer service of Streamyx.

I am currently subscribing to Streamyx broadband 512KB package but sad to say the quality is just a little better than a normal dialup service. For strange reason, I have to leave the modem at least 10-15 minutes, on many other cases even more than 30 minutes, before I can connect to Streamyx. This is just absurd. And don’t you dare to tell me to call the Customer Service number to rectify the problem for all I get is just that nice recorded voice that make me press button after buttons to get me to the right department only to be told to wait and wait and wait. To add salt to injury, the connection is always disrupted when there is incoming call, so the waiting cycle is repeated over and over again.

I believe many other users of Streamyx face similar problems but it seems there no solution to this seemingly endless problem. If you dont believe me, just check out a Google page when you search for Streamyx and see for your self what I am talking about.

Read also recent letters published by Malaysiakini here and here about what people think of Streamyx.

The moral of the story is, to achieve 50% national broadband penetration, the Government must come up with a new strategy for its implementation as well as new partners. Don’t let the people suffer yet again. Enough is enough.

Read [Star Online]

[tags]broadband, streamyx, internet, National Broadband Implementation Plan[/tags]