Dear Sir / Madam,


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



We would like to assure you 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.



What Is Fair Usage Policy (FUP)?



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 industry practice, for both fixed and mobile players. All industry players have traffic management in place and mobile players particularly due to their natural capacity limitations. It is aimed at making sure broadband services are 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 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 allocating the total available bandwidth to users equitably during peak periods, especially for international connectivity.



Of late, our traffic profiles are changing and increasing quite rapidly. With no traffic control 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. With the recognition of the increased demand in overseas content, we are also working to migrate some content to servers within Malaysia thereby providing faster local access and at the same time freeing up additional international bandwidth.



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.









Current Situation



After successful pilots we ran a few months ago, in the past few weeks we have been rolling out nationwide a new traffic management model. Even though the number of calls to our call centre notifying slow browsing or low speed did not increase, some customers complained about their international browsing experience.



As dynamic allocation of bandwidth requires some specific settings to be fine tuned area by area, while the majority of the customers should see improvements, it is possible that the experience of some customers has actually worsened. We apologise to our customers for the inconvenience this has caused. We elicit and welcome feedback on the experience in different parts of the country at different times of the day. We have set up an email account impact@tm.com.my, as of 1 December 2010, dedicated for this purpose. Thank you for your inputs, speed readings and account details submitted thus far.



We are still collating all inputs from customers and analyzing the profiles to match against the network data but have put forward an action plan to immediately alleviate the situation.



Action Plan



Bottom line, we are listening to you and taking action on the network issues and hope to see improvements in the coming week. We are reviewing some parameters, but the system has to be in place due to surge in traffic during this period of school holidays which is contributing to the increased network congestion.



We will be monitoring this very closely this coming week, to see if the above has yielded positive results whilst constantly reviewing the parameters to ensure that dynamic allocation is in place in order to provide fair experience for all customers.



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. We do listen and are taking action. We look forward to further constructive feedback, and will take all comments on board to help us make key changes.



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



Yours sincerely,

TM