Lemak Lemang
A walk down the Yellow Brick Road of Malaysia's Corridor of the future
by Jeff Ooi, Malaysia
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P2P users the bandwidth suckers?
Sep 21, 2006 13:52As far as Malaysia is concerned, the culprit that is causing the slowdown in international links to the Internet cloud may have been determined.
A group of ISP customers around Kuala Lumpur gathered together September 15 to formalize a TM Net User Group for the Klang valley.
Senior management staff, led by TM Net CEO Michael Lai, turned up in full force to lend support to the meeting and a dialogue of sorts became an opportune moment to address the issue of international links..
Of late, broadband customers have been complaining of severe latency and speed lethargy connecting to international links.
In response, TM Net showed some stats to illustrate that the Internet pipeline linking Malaysia to the global world now totalled 17Gbps, with major links hooked to the center of Internet world, the US.
TM Net has also pledged to increase this to 21Gbps by December, and double it to 42Gbps by end 2007.
It's a vast connectivity for a country of 25 million people, with less than 2 percent broadband penetration. Yet, international links have been slow. Or so the customers grouse.
Out came other slides by the TM Net technical chief, showing that peer-to-peer (P2P) users have been choking up the bandwidth.
A slide showed that, presently, a minority of 13 percent Internet users are sucking up 73 percent of bandwidth. Which means 10Gbps of the total bandwidth of 17Gbps is being hogged by P2P users!
So the question is: Will the increased bandwidth be sucked up by the P2P users in the same ratio?
- Talkback
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"Will the increased bandwidth be sucked up by the P2P users in the same ratio?"
Probably so, but it doesn't seem to make a difference to a lot of people including myself. P2P is the future of online distribution, and TMNet can't run away from that.
Sep 21, 2006 14:21
Then what about those perfectly legal stuffs like Skype (based on P2P) with Video Conferencing would really suck up bandwidth, right?
Personally, I think as long as the users are doing legal stuffs on P2P, I think they shouldn't be stopped. I have used P2P to download the MS Windows Vista RC1 because the MS downloader went till 90% and I accidentally off my PC, then I was back to 0%.
Sep 21, 2006 23:13
I'm curious, what exactly do the slides that they show look like?
Sep 21, 2006 23:55
To blame that on downloading... mainly P2P is not acceptable, and why other country never blame it on P2P while their speed can goes up to 10MB or 100MBps ?
To blame it on downloading to hog the line, its like asking all ISP to stop providing broadband and just give everybody a dial-up connection.
Why are u on broadband ? bcos u need the speed, u want to download big files, watch high detail video, streaming, etc. What is the point of having broadband if u dun want to do all that ?
Sep 22, 2006 00:17
why other country never blame it on P2P while their speed can goes up to 10MB or 100MBps ?
Do u understand how international links works..? and why do we accessed it in the 1st place?
Most other countries don't access international links that much simply because they are accessing mostly their country;'s own link like a major LAN. or MAN.
That's why speed was never an issue..but for countries with low content like us , we accessed international links more ..thereby increasing the cost and speed to access those links.
Sep 22, 2006 08:57
Stop blaming users over your pathetic services, and stop bitchin' as if there are no P2P users in other countries. Period.
Sep 22, 2006 09:59
By the way... TM Net technical chief, thank you for the IMPECCABLE broadband services.
Sep 22, 2006 10:06
You made it sounds like the answer to the title is something new. It has already been told by TMnet in the past that they would not benefit the P2P users by upgrading its bandwidth. Anyhow, everyone agreed that the could not be the main reason but TMnet's lack of vision for the country is holding everyone back. Just because of these so called "culprit" companies that relies on TMnet on daily basis gets shot in the gut, painful and bleeding yet could still survive for a period of time. TMnet is holding the country back another 5 years because it just refuse to invest on something better than 10 years old copper lines.
Sep 22, 2006 10:14
What TM Net CEO Michael Lai should do is to give the endusers a tour of the IDC, what cables they are using, routers, switch and explain how they program the routing table.
As far as I have heard, the IDCs are overcrowded. Why? I leave it to your imagination if not your experience on how Malaysian do business.
Sep 22, 2006 10:19
the stupid at the call center dont even know what hell is "bittorent" or BT. i hope I-burst, maxis and jaring can stell away 99.9% of they current customers next year, coz a lot of new saying that they expanding so fast and the balance 0.01% for the TerrorKom staff use, on that monent all the traffic will very smooth..
Terrible Terrible service !!!!!! of the century even can put that at the world record!!!!! WE BEEN CHEATED BY TMNUT!!!!!
Sep 28, 2006 18:21
Is unfair to call all P2P users bandwidth suckers. As the information age getting more advance we just have to accept and blend in with it. A friend from Japan told me once "You can have a first world tech but it would be a waste if you use it with a third world mind". Which explains Malaysia is still a third world country unlike Singapore that is first world.
Jan 31, 2007 12:53
over here in New Zealand, we have what we called as fair usage policy. This is where the use of certain features such as p2p will be set at dialup speed once it reaches a certain limit during peak time. This is usually @ 700mb per day.
But this is totally an option. You could aways go to the ISP that doesn't make this restriction.
Look fair to me and it does seem to me that this implies that p2p users kinda sucks the bandwidth.
Oct 10, 2007 01:54
I felt those P2P user are juz using what they are paying for. The only different is that, now with P2P they are using it more frequently. If they are subscribing to a 5Mbps, I think the max they can go is 5 or 6 Mbps right? Usually ISP calculation are base on busty nature so that they can oversubscribe...etc. Now when things are no longer busty....they will encounter problem.
Hence maybe ISPs should change their ILC bandwidth requirement calculation algorithm/methods. It is easy to blame on P2P because P2P is famous for distributing illegal contents. Hence they would easily get support from those related industries. So that they can buy less International Bandwidth which will in turn means more profit. We do understand that. But please bear in mind that P2P tech is a very efficient content distributing technology. Sooner or later, online application will be built, base on such technology. For example distributing game's updates, skype VoIP, Joost for IPTV...etc. I hope the related engineers can reconsider and see the efficiency of P2P technology, in long run.
Your good country will better connected as compare to countries which throttle P2P traffic because they will be playing catch-up when they find that they have to 'unthrottle' P2P traffic due to mentioned legal application. Moreover International Bandwidth will not be getting cheaper in the future.
I am from Singapore, I am not very 100% sure what our ISPs do to P2P traffic, but there are alot of rumour that they seem to be having a 'Third World Mind" as Mr Loong would have put it. lol.
I am 'Kaisi' (afraid/no guts), I heard P2P download even for legal software like Linux... might be corrupted with spyware, hence I seldom try. When I see my friends download via P2P, they are slow most of the time. Either those seeds are plain lousy or ....hmmm. I am juz not good enough to gather proof. Good Luck Guys.
May 17, 2008 00:04
About Jeff Ooi
Jeff Ooi is an Internet and e-Business consultant based in Kuala Lumpur who's spent the last four years blogging internationally on the tech scene, on anything and nothing. Which doesn't really explain why most of his own technology is about three years out of date. He doesn't even own a PDA after his Palm V crashed. He's on 3G, though... Lemak Lemang refers to coconut-flavored sticky rice stuffed in a bamboo container.
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