by Alvin Zhi Guang Lim

Created on: October 14, 2008   Last Updated: September 14, 2010

The number of Internet users in Malaysia has increased exponentially for the past few years, thanks to the efforts from the government to promote the usage of Internet and computers. Take a look in Alexa and you will notice that there are a lot of Malaysia-based sites in the top 100,000 ranking
Lowyat.NET, MalaysiaKini and Maybank2u to name a few.

This can only be achieved with the introduction of high-speed broadband services by Telekom Malaysia (TM) which is also our national telecommunication company. The standard package which has been offered to Malaysian home users is the 1MB line at the price of RM 88 per month, which is around USD $ 25. There are other packages such as the newly introduced 4MB package which costs around RM 268 per month, equivalent to around USD $ 77 a month.

However, most Malaysians are not satisfied as the broadband service provided is not stable. There are times when the service goes down or the line becomes very slow. This is still tolerable if it is used by home users but certainly not for business users who want 100% uptime for their business continuity plan.

Another issue is the usage of bit torrent is not advisable by the service provider. Many complaints have been lodged to the service provider in regards to the slow bit torrent speed even though there are ample seeds available. The service provider refused to comment much on this issue.

Most Malaysians believe that the reason behind the mediocre service is due to the monopoly held by the service provider. There are other broadband service providers but their services too, are mediocre or worse since the underlying network backbone of most cities are still owned by TM.

When one looks across the Straits of Johor, to Singapore, the broadband services are much better than those available in Malaysia. One could easily subscribe to a 7.2 MB broadband service for 2 years, at 50% discount, at around USD $ 14 per month. This is partly due to the fierce competition from various service providers on the island nation whereas in Malaysia, the competition among broadband service providers can be considered as irrelevant.

Nevertheless, one should not complain too much about the state of broadband service in Malaysia because it did improve over the years. One should never forget the time when one needed to use a dial-up modem to get online or to use a 384 Kb per second broadband line to play online games.

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