Archive | September, 2005

Well it’s not always good to talk about the bad things, so let’s talk about the good things for once (and some bad thing too of course, TMnut is far from perfect).

I have a problem with their customer service model for a start, there seems to be no escalation procedure, for my part that’s very frustrating, I need to speak to tier 2 or tier 3 technical support if I have a problem, not tier 1, because all the normal things I can fix or figure out myself.

When I’m talking about packet loss and traceroute, tier one just doesn’t cut it. I e-mailed endlessly and it continued going round in circles, I provided detailed information but still got no replies containing sense or useful input.

I e-mailed the CEO, eventually I got annoyed and got a little pissed with them, I told them to escalate it to someone who knew what I was talking about or don’t bother.

So they did, they called me and said they would send someone round, and come they did, FOUR of them. One was actually a senior technician too, they knew what they were doing, they had access to the core routers for the peering to the US and showed me the latency and where it occured, it was clearly due to overloading.

The quality of the connection to the US peer was good, my connection to the Streamyx network is very good, but the infrastructure is buckling under the load.

The technician said that 2 of the 4 international links are currently not working, and even with all in force they are still over-utilized, in his own words he said ‘it’s fucked up’.

He said Tm.net technical department has told the management many times they need to upgrade the international links and stop selling until they can support the capacity as it’s making their lives very difficult and it’s degrading quality of service for the customers, but well the sales people keep selling, people keep buying and everyone suffers more.

I was thankful to get some technical people in my house, they proved that there’s nothing wrong with my line, my modem, my setup or anything else, it’s an infrastructure problem.

Hopefully this is something the new CEO Michael Lai can address with inputs from Mack and Jeff Ooi (and perhaps some of us other small fish).

For the past 2 weeks I’d say my connection has actually been pretty good, download speeds have been reasonable, latency has been good for the past week (often under 300ms to google and yahoo, which was unheard of before) and the connection hasn’t dropped.

I don’t seem to have had any problems with the ridiculous Web Cache either, perhaps they disabled it for me (which they did say was possible). I am still getting IP’s in the 60.48 or 60.49 range, but I am having decent service now.

Hopefully things will only get better, is there a brighter future ahead for Malaysian broadband?

I’ve heard rumours of more bandwidth upgrades coming soon too…which hopefully are not true, as it will just lead to a decreate in QoS for everyone (512 – 1MB, 1MB – 2MB).

Keep up the good work Tmnut, and we won’t mind paying 🙂