I've been involved in similar discussions between TIME/MCMC/CFM and myself.

Feel free to contact me if you need any help/information.

I think you may be wrongly reading the traceroute.

The traceroute starts from LA (gi10-0.224.core01.lax01.atlas.cogentco.com).

The landing point in Malaysia is telecommalaysia.sjc03.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.12.2). While 320ms++ is by no means wonderful, it isn't horrible either.

Depending on what kind of meeting you have set up, spouting out accusations like above can turn around and bite you in the ass. In your correspondence, keep your calm; some sarcasm can work to your benefit... try not to be pushy or sound angry. If it's a closed meeting, you may want to bring a friend who is able to give you legal advice... and if you aren't 100% clear about the technical aspect, a technical person as well. The majority of your complaint/issue should be able to broken down into points/questions/concerns that you have about the service; write these down... and during the meeting, MAKE SURE YOU GO THROUGH THEM ONE BY ONE. Given the choice, TM (or TIME in my case) will avoid as many of them as possible.

If you are short on points, read the MCMC laws and legislations thoroughly. They may help you to come up with more substance. (This may also bite you in the ass, which is why I recommended the friend who can provide legal advice above).

This post has been edited by biatch0: May 9 2009, 02:39 PM

Rest assured that all the important people in the MCMC already know how horrible TM is. Unfortunately, the decision whether or not to do anything isn't in their hands. The reason why nothing can be done is the same as why the last mile is still "owned" by TM up till today. The majority of the "old-school" internet community has been fighting to open the last mile since the TM HiS days which was shortly after TM "claimed ownership" of the last mile.

This is the point we brought up repeatedly without getting anywhere. There was little to no discussion involved in the deciding of who the last mile was going to go to. From a neutral perspective at the time, if the last mile was to be awarded to any ISP... it should have gone to Jaring/MIMOS who were MUCH bigger than TM at the time; not to mention they did a hell of a lot more in terms of advancing the state of the Internet in Malaysia back then (TM pretty much just sat around on their asses doing nothing; looks like they are exactly the same now as they were back then). The different was that a number of people in high up places had large slices of the TM pie... and that's exactly the same as it is now.

TM seems to have an awfully small profit margin if you look at their annual financial reports given that they have almost 100% monopoly... ever wondered why? Here's a hint: it has nothing to do with improving infrastructure.

On a larger scale (ie. internationally), Jaring/MIMOS is bigger than TM. They have comparable international bandwidth to (last I checked) more landing points worldwide than TM... utilized by their users (which due to our last-mile policy means mainly datacenter clients).

As for AstroNET, it was tested, it was pretty horrible, it was given up on. Imagine watching Astro (who have a deal that smells interestingly similar to TM) on a Champions League Final night... then it starts to rain. Now imagine surfing or downloading with the same limitations that Astro has... paying a ridiculous amount because satellite transmission isn't cheap... having enough latency that you could take a flight to pick up the packets from your destination yourself... AND still needing a TM phoneline (which you still need to pay for) to create your uplink. AstroNet was scrapped pretty soon after the beta testing stages.

Re: dialup > wired+wireless broadband. The majority of end users will only know Jaring for their wireless services. The last-mile policy has stuck a spanner in the development of our wired solutions; which is why anyone who is remotely interested in being an ISP has ended up going wireless (which I haven't been a big fan of since the beginning of time) - this doesn't include the small number of ISPs who have lucked out in terms of last-mile penetration such as TIME. The only thing that our last-mile policy has managed to do over the past 15-20 years is make some people very rich... and kept our wired technology stuck in 1995. The speeds and technology that you see from TM today were already slow by comparison to many countries worldwide back then... fast forward to today and we're still stuck in 1995 while TM continues to advertise BLAZING FAST internet. I suppose in a way you could thank TM for our (in general) early adoption of wireless technologies; except no ISP in their right mind would choose wireless as a medium given a choice.

This post has been edited by biatch0: May 11 2009, 07:30 AM

How is anything related to a company like TM not political? Proton and Naza aren't political either right?

The problem with having a TM technical person there is that they aren't trained to know what to say AND/OR what NOT to say. If there is a technical person present, that person would probably have used to be a tech/engineer a couple of years ago and is now in a more managerial role (which would give him some experience when it comes to not saying dumb things that implicate them even more).

Hey guys... look... it's Captain Obvious!!!