Tete-A-Tech

It's the broadband, stupid

Definition of crappy Monday morning: The Internet does not work.

Okay, I'm not exactly someone who gets 50 pieces of email first thing in the morning, all which are urgent and important (it was more like two or three this morning), so it's not like it's a national crisis.

But, I EXPECT that when I boot up my computer, and the little blinking lights on my ADSL modem are all lit up, all is well in the Internet connection universe. And when lights are on, but no bytes are coming through, I can get through to a customer service center and receive an explanation.

TM Net never ceases to amaze me. I mean just when you THINK they have it right (like having enough customer service people to take calls which was their last problem), they manage to sink to new depths: The engaged tone.

A customer service center should never ever give a customer an engaged or busy signal when it calls. You don't have to be Patricia Seybold (customer.com--a book that should be required reading for everyone in the service line) to figure that one out.

In the end, I had to ring a few friends in the geographical vicinity and ask them if they were having problems. And then out of sheer desperation, I rang up TM Net in Cyberjaya and demanded to know what was going on. To my surprise, not only did they not know that their call center was being "call-bombed", they seemed entirely clueless as to what was going on with the connectivity (perhaps it is the distance... Cyberjaya is quite somewhere out there).

It took a call to a friend, who checked lowyat.net to find out that the problem was pretty widespread. Users from diverse locations such as Miri, Kepong, Penang, Subang Jaya, Bukit Jalil, Sunway were all reporting problems accessing the Internet and inability to access the call center. And when I finally got through, I had to listen to a pile of customer announcements (stalling tactics in the call center world) which included the announcement that (paraphrased) "we are pleased to announce that the submarine cable has been restored and all international links are back up to speed and our services are all back to normal".

Someone in the TM Net call center has a sense of humor.

And when I finally got a human on the phone, I was told there's nothing wrong. How can so many people be experiencing an outage but there's nothing wrong? Lying to your customers is only second to being ignorant about a problem that is obviously happening.

I eventually sought refuge in Starbucks at Bangsar, which did not seem to be affected by the outage. Wonder why...

From my standpoint, the provision of broadband is really not rocket science. Buy equipment. Install equipment. Roll out lines. We're in business surely? Apparently not.

It is nothing short of disgraceful that Internet users in Malaysia are mostly stuck at 1MB, paying anywhere between RM66 and RM88 for what is effectively the slow lane in the Internet superhighway. (I happen to know that for around that price in Hong Kong, you can get a blazing-fast 10MB). And then there's TM Net's service reliability. I don't expect 24/7/365 connectivity--outages are normal. But they are not normal when the provider is apparently sleeping on the job without any knowledge that an outage has occurred. A few years ago, TM Net actually was not able to provide Internet services to newer residential areas that were wired up with fiber optics because it didn't have the technology!

Now, it's vengeance time on neighborhoods that can get broadband through copper wires because our broadband speed is constrained not simply by ADSL technology, but the age of the copper wires (and given that we have apparently not been able to lay new water pipes here in KL, presumably new copper telephone lines are not a given).

There appears to be no sense of urgency in bumping up the speed, bringing the masses to broadband (and it took a decree from the former PM, loaded into the national budget before prices went down the last time), and no real interest in developing the broadband and Internet service components of its business on the part of Telekom Malaysia, the parent company of TM Net.

Last month, TM Net used the damaged submarine cable to make a case for more users to host their sites locally. "Malaysia has more than sufficient capacity for Web hosting services and it would be timely for us to collectively have a change of mindset with regard to our local capabilities in hosting Malaysian content. I would like to encourage all organisations and individuals to host their Web sites locally not only to leverage on the country's strong infrastructure for hosting services but also to be more self-reliant to ensure that disasters like this do not have such impact on them," TM Business CEO Zamzamzairani Mohd Isa said in a January 5 statement to the press.

Is that all TM can come up with? Use local hosting so you can access your site in the event another earthquake happens? (How likely is another earthquake that also rips up the submarine cables likely to happen?) What happened to conventional business case justifications like costing? Superior service? More storage? Bandwidth? Privacy? Nope. Host with us and never fear an earthquake again.

Not only does TM seem to be ignoring the goldmine of broadband and broadband services right under its nose, it is busy trying to spend money to encourage people to make more calls from their homeline--as evidenced by its latest homeline package campaign. Now, I realize it's the festive season, so maybe people would make more calls. But with the options of Skype, Instant Messenger and the long-distance call charge killer, VoIP, err, this seems like a marketing and revenue-generation campaign worthy of a wooden spoon award.

Ring, ring! Fixed line is a dead business for telcos. In fact, most of the basic services that an incumbent telco like TM provides are essentially commoditized services in the long term. When services become commoditized, making money is about getting as many people on the basics and then flogging them the extras. Everyday there are new applications and new companies looking to take away business from traditional telcos like Telekom. Yet, are they sitting up and smelling the stinky tofu? I think not.

TM should take a lesson from McDonald's--would you like fries with that? And only RM2 more to supersize!

Recent Comments

cellular: Thank you for your help! more »

madmusicmajor: I wonder what they'll sell next..haha more »

madyellowduck: Spangaroo - yep that was pretty much my impression as well when I went into the app. I knew a ... more »

spangaroo: I find that it's not worth the effort at this point. Unless you have a group of people on ... more »

madmusicmajor: There's been lots of invites and shout-outs regarding Google wave in Facebook here in the Philippines too..hmmm. Might as ... more »

slingswish: agree =D more »

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