No access restriction, high GE13 traffic could slow access, says MCMC

May 02, 2013

KUALA LUMPUR, May 2 – An initial probe has shown no access restrictions by internet providers but high visitor traffic could be causing congestion to certain sites, Malaysia’s internet regulator said tonight.

The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) said it had begun investigating several complaints on access restriction “purportedly carried out by Internet Service Providers (ISPs).”

Early investigations indicate no such restrictions by ISPs but the congestion in affected sites could be due to a spike in visitors that is “related to GE13” in the past few days, the MCMC said in a statement.

“So far we have only received one official complaint on Monday, April 29 2013, from UMNO Online claiming that its readers faced difficulty in accessing the portal. However, we are still waiting for an official complaint from Malaysiakini on the same matter,” said Sheikh Raffie Abd Rahman, who is the commission’s strategic communications chief.

He said MCMC viewed the allegations of access restriction by ISPs seriously as those found to so would face action under the Communications and Multimedia Act 1998 for breaching their licence conditions.

In the statement, MCMC advised the public to not jump to conclusions before a thorough investigation has been completed.

“There are several possibilities that could affect quality of service, such as issues relating to network routing and capacity constraints due to an increase in the number of people accessing those particular websites.

“It is also possible that some of these websites experienced DDOS attacks. The root of the problem is difficult to ascertain without conducting a comprehensive network audit.,” MCMC said in the statement, referring to distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks experienced by several websites including The Malaysian Insider.

The commission said local ISPs have been advised to step up their respective network security levels two weeks ago in order to avoid any service disruption.