Telekom Malaysia Bhd ™ wishes to clarify on our Fair Usage Policy (FUP) and address several comments in the blogosphere on allegations of a  ‘hard cap’ for international bandwidth being enforced by TM.

Firstly, we apologise for the inconvenience that our customers are currently facing on our internet services.

We would like to assure all our customers that it is not, in any way TM’s intention to enforce any ‘hard caps’ on our customers.

As a matter of principle, however, TM needs to abide by a FUP to ensure that the network caters to all customers in a fair manner, and this has been in place for a few years for Streamyx which is a contended, best effort service. This means the Streamyx network is catered to be shared by everybody at any point in time to ensure everybody gets a “fair share” of the bandwidth. Currently UniFi is not affected, as it is a new premium service.

The Streamyx “Fair Usage Policy” is available on our website (http://www.streamyx.com/customer_care/customer_care.php?id=customer_care_fair_usage_policy) and it basically describes the list of specific heavy usage activities (like P2P and gaming) that will be managed during peak periods.

As you all know, this kind of bandwidth management or FUP is a global and common telco and celco industry practice. It is already in place in Malaysia amongst the mobile broadband players and aimed at making sure our broadband service is fast and reliable whenever in use.  It is designed to benefit all users, especially normal or non-heavy users during peak periods, so that all can enjoy higher and fair browsing and surfing speed.

In general, TM’s FUP and implementation is aimed at providing an optimum internet experience to all Streamyx customers by rationalising the internet speed during peak periods (3pm – 1am).

Of late, our traffic profiles are changing quite rapidly, and we are noticing that network congestion can hit different parts of the country at different times of the day or week. When congestion hits, depending on the usage patterns, customers subscribing to the same package but generating different traffic patterns may experience different levels of service performance.

In an effort to ensure a fair distribution of resources amongst all customers at all times, whenever congestion occurs, TM’s network is able to calculate how many users are active at any given time and allocate dynamically the resources across all customers with active sessions.

In rare cases of heavy congestion, we ensure that no customers may get below a minimum threshold of international bandwidth, but there is no ‘ceiling’ to the bandwidth each customer can get.

The problems some customer are experiencing now may have stemmed post a successful pilot of a new traffic management model we ran a few months before, following which we went nationwide about 3 weeks ago. Clearly there is room for improvement and we are working hard to resolve this.

As dynamic allocation of bandwidth requires some specific settings that need to be fine tuned area by area, we elicit and welcome feedback on the experience in different parts of the country at different times of the day. We have set up a special email account where you can send your readings for our review: impact@tm.com.my effective 1 December 2010.

From our analysis, the current traffic patterns are, for most part, in line with our expectations on traffic management, and the speeds being delivered should suffice for a smooth internet experience.

Where the internet experience falls short, we will further investigate both individual cases and the service in its entirety to address specific concerns that they may be facing, and will respond to these customers directly.

Rest assured, TM takes note of all customer feedback to continuously ensure improved customer experience end-to-end.

From a market communications perspective, the FUP awareness campaign is already ongoing and we will further clarify as to the rules we are implementing – and why.

In fact, a bloggers briefing has already been scheduled for 17 December post our engagement with LYN and Kambingz earlier. About 40-50 selected bloggers will be invited to represent the wider blogger community to keep them abreast with our efforts to improve service delivery and customer experience overall, and to seek constructive feedback on these efforts. We hope to address, or at least start to address many concerns at this forum.

We thank you for your continuous feedback and ask for your kind understanding and patience as we work to deliver on our commitment to service quality and overall customer experience.

TELEKOM MALAYSIA BHD

wow i got the official response.

you guys are not going to like it.

i'm still digesting it. standby.

guys, read the post carefully, look between the lines.

they deployed a traffic management program in the last couple of weeks.

the program basically failed and instead of helping distribute the available bandwidth equally across all users, especially during peak hours, it is throttling everyone on a consistent and widespread basis which is exactly not what was intended.

e.g.

during peak hours, there are 500 users sharing 100MB of bandwidth speed.

the program is supposed to give each user 0.5MB, right?

the program has bugged out and is giving everyone 0.1MB of speed instead, and "reserving" the remaining 50MB of speed unused.

All the grief has been a huge bug, completely unintentional. They are trying to give everyone a good service by evenly distributing the available bandwidth, but they ended up accidentally screwing everyone up.

I have spoken to them directly, and i've suggested a rollback; undo the program they deployed, and take it back for further testing before sending it out again.

It worked during their testing and pilot, but obviously once its out in the open, it fails.

All of this isn't a big conspiracy or whatever, its just a plain old fashion mistake.

guys, read the post carefully, look between the lines.

they deployed a traffic management program in the last couple of weeks.

the program basically failed and instead of helping distribute the available bandwidth equally across all users, especially during peak hours, it is throttling everyone on a consistent and widespread basis which is exactly not what was intended.

e.g.

during peak hours, there are 200 users sharing 100MB of bandwidth speed.

the program is supposed to give each user 0.5MB, right?

the program has bugged out and is giving everyone 0.1MB of speed instead, and "reserving" the remaining 50MB of speed unused.

All the grief has been a huge bug, completely unintentional. They are trying to give everyone a good service by evenly distributing the available bandwidth, but they ended up accidentally screwing everyone up.

I have spoken to them directly, and i've suggested a rollback; undo the program they deployed, and take it back for further testing before sending it out again.

It worked during their testing and pilot, but obviously once its out in the open, it fails.

All of this isn't a big conspiracy or whatever, its just a plain old fashion mistake.

The problems some customer are experiencing now may have stemmed post a successful pilot of a new traffic management model we ran a few months before, following which we went nationwide about 3 weeks ago. Clearly there is room for improvement and we are working hard to resolve this.

From our analysis, the current traffic patterns are, for most part, in line with our expectations on traffic management, and the speeds being delivered should suffice for a smooth internet experience.

This response from TM really dissapointing. Why cant they just announce that they are doing a test instead of secretly conducting it? Why are they so scared to announce it?

This response from TM really dissapointing. Why cant they just announce that they are doing a test instead of secretly conducting it? Why are they so scared to announce it?

Their argument is that they did announce it with the existence of the FUP.

The FUP, they argue, gives the right to do whatever they want to control traffic.

Does Petronas tell you when they change the type of pumps they use at the petrol stations? of course not. same thing here apparently.