lowyat.com ? Ours is lowyat.net .

Hi I am new to LY.COM, came accross this article as well, tot It mite interest you, if wimax is a failure to, does this mean hsdpa is our only hope? or do we need to get wired all the time?

Australian WiMAX pioneer trashes technology as "miserable failure"
March 20th, 2008 in CommsDay Australasia | add new comment | email this story

Australia's first WiMAX operator, Hervey Bay's Buzz Broadband, has closed its network, with the CEO labeling the technology as a "disaster" that "failed miserably."

In an astonishing tirade to an international WiMAX conference audience in Bangkok yesterday afternoon, CEO Garth Freeman slammed the technology, saying its non-line of sight performance was "non-existent" beyond just 2 kilometres from the base station, indoor performance decayed at just 400m and that latency rates reached as high as 1000 milliseconds. Poor latency and jitter made it unacceptable for many Internet applications and specifically VoIP, which Buzz has employed as the main selling point to induce people to shed their use of incumbent services.

Freeman highlighted his presentation with a warning to delegates, saying "WiMAX may not work." He said that the technology was still "mired in opportunistic hype," pointing to the fact most deployments were still in trials, that it was largely used by start-up carriers and was supported by "second-tier vendors", which he contrasted with HSPA with 154 commercial networks already in operation and support from top tier vendors.

What made Freeman's presentation most extraordinary was that just 12 months ago he fronted the same event with a generally positive appraisal of the platform which at that stage he had deployed just a few months before. At the time, Freeman said that his company had signed 10% of its 55,000 user target market in just two months, a market share that rose to 25%, on the back of an advertising campaign that highlighted value VoIP prices.

He did acknowledge at the time that the technology had indoor coverage issues, which he yesterday said had earned him a quick and negative reaction at the time from his supplier, Airspan. Other early WiMAX adopters have also reported issues with indoor coverage: VSNL in India reported indoor loss at just 200m from the base station at an IEEE conference last year.

HORSES FOR COURSES: Freeman says Buzz has now abandoned WiMAX in favour of a "horses for courses" policy. This includes use of the TD-CDMA standard at 1.9GHz-used by operators such as New Zealand's Woosh Wireless-and a platform he described as wireless DOCSIS- a relatively little known technology that takes HFC plant and extends its capabilities via wireless mesh. He said wireless DOCSIS operates at up to 38Mbps in the 3.5GHz spectrum and its customer premises equipment supported two voice ports for under $A70 while it boasted "huge cell coverage." He also was employing more conventional wireless mesh platforms at 2.4GHz that support up to 10Mbps with CPE voice ports costing less than A$80.

Despite his problems with WiMAX, Freeman is a believer that competitors should operate their own infrastructure and not depend on Telstra unbundled or wholesale offerings. Prior to Buzz he was involved in the rollout of regional Victorian HFC networks as an executive with Neighborhood Cable. He says the use of wireless is essential in Hervey Bay, because ADSL is blocked to 80% of the population because of Telstra's use of pairgain and RIMs, while what ADSL ports are available are now largely exhausted. But years of successive government policies had weakened the case for standalone infrastructure, beginning with restrictive policies in the pay television market which he said undermined independent HFC deployments.

"I'm against government micromanagement of the market. Government should start to provide a conducive investment environment."

Not all WiMAX operators are unhappy.

Internode says an Airspan-supplied network is providing consistent average speeds of 6Mbps at distances up to 30km, with CEO Simon Hackett describing the platform as "proven."

Freeman's frank words left many at the WiMAX event looking uncomfortable but none more so than his co-panelist Adrian de Brenni representing Opel Networks. De Brenni, standing in for an absent Jason Horley, said little new about Opel that hasn't already been discussed, except to state that QoS would be a product feature of the future Opel wholesale offering "including voice."

by Grahame Lynch

Back in Malaysia, I tried using Maxis Broadband due to the promotion they had during PC Fair. God, it suck like shit. I can't believe that they are saying that Maxis BB is good. Anybody saying that is not right in their mind. Nuff said, I kept on getting DC and always I have to try and restart the modem or router or both. This is bullshit. Although I hate TMNET with their arrogant monopoly but I guess we have no choice as the government wants to earn more money by controlling almost everything and having a medium called "Laws" to actually block people from choices. Here in Australia, there are more than 10 ISPs that can provide awesome charges. Speeds up to 24 mbps. TMNET asks us to buy ADSL2+ modem (more expensive through their seller) but their service have not even reached the ADSL1 thereshold (8 mbps).


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Frustated with BB in Malaysia. Ananda making more money.

Well to answer that one, for an average yuppy today, a combination of the both is best... wired while at home/office and mobile internet WHILE ON THE MOVE..
MAXIS WAS NOT AWARDED THE WImax licence, its given to small time operators, that may not even have the budget to roll it out.
Maxis Hsdpa, works fine for my needs, at office its TM Streamyx and at home the same....

We require higher speeds for more productivity. Each Mbps lost means thousands of ringgit lost to others in this globalisation era. How can we obtain the business edge when the ministers still are in the kampung era. Dial-up is not enough. We need the edge to be successful.

My 2 cents.

No problem with MAXIS......

Is there something wrong woth this site unable to load screen shot of my speed test, by the way using the ZTE, in TTDI area, with a router I get 700kbps and uplink is low at 88kbps only - a limitation on the technology apparently...the TTDI center folks are great, walk-in anytime for excellent service!

Keep it up MAXIS !!!

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Added on March 31, 2008, 6:25 pmThey even have a special broadband counter the cool guys and gals in black...check them out...are other centers the same? pls respond peeps?

This post has been edited by salmiclub: Mar 31 2008, 06:25 PM

Agree with you, but coming from a Consulting background, people MUST understand that speed and price is hard to juggle, Menteri Kampung I agree, I wonder which DUCK heads MCMC now...

Guys, by throwing statements like "boycott maxis" , ananda "con-man" an so on, you are risking this site being sued. its called LIBEL.

Vijay, pls note.....

MCMC is no use ! Streamyx f&*7up so long also no action, sekarang YB JeffOOI also close one eye....i wonder WHY???

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Added on March 31, 2008, 6:43 pmcustomer service wise, MAXIS WINS HANDS DOWN la.... admit it butt-freeze??

This post has been edited by wan2002: Mar 31 2008, 06:43 PM

Hi there, looks like my comments pissed a few off you guys, well, sorry if it was rude...but to be FAIR, I am a MAXIS user from 2000, mobile as well as the recent USB, no problemo, ALSO I find they have the best, the best customer service, be it in the call center or at the Maxis center, TELL ME which other provider has that? BE HONEST??

Butt-Head, thanks for your inputs, I appreciate your firm but fair standpoint.

A LIITLE BIRD TELLS ME that Maxis is spending a huge load of case this coming months to totally increase their capacity and reach. HUGE.

I am writing this from Rawang. Cheers!

I repeat, if you hv a problem, talk to them, or walk in - YES, I hv seen the all black uniform, COOL !
Its all over the place, I was in Penang last week and the NORTHAM building has a Maxis Center, the manager there was COOL and I spoke tohim about returning by old ZTE for the USB, no questions asked they immediately upgraded me, all I had to do was pay 100 activation fee.

KEEP IT UP MAXIS!

The bandwith total cap per month is totally crap

YES sir, sorry, lowyat.net

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Added on March 31, 2008, 7:37 pmWho is BUTT-FREEZE? Did u mean bytefreeze?

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Added on March 31, 2008, 7:40 pmwhats a high gain antenna? can i use it for homeplug?

This post has been edited by camelia_lim: Mar 31 2008, 07:40 PM

hmmm, is it just me, or there are a lot of 0 post members saying that maxis is good??
i smell something fishy, anyone notice?

Well minus the 0 post members there are still a big group of users who are not satisfied with the service. I have friends using this service and they too can get high blood pressure from using this service.

by the meaning win hands down, u mean they are better??
if u mean so, let me tell u something

try calling them and say that u are facing very serious connection problem, they will only help in in some really basic customer service, like go to ur homepage, bla bla bla...
if u still say cannot, they will ONLY do 2 things, which is:
1) "Sir, can u switch off ur modem, unplug the lan cable form ur PC for at least 30mins? pls restart ur PC as well"
2)"er..sir, regarding on this case, i will open a case for u, a technician will approach to u within 5-7 working days"
and they really take 7 days to call u

if u are still not happy enuf, i have more...
remember early this year, when maxis say that they are doing some upgrade, and the server really got screw up and all our speed is damn slow??
i called them the night that the problem started, and it took the technician 7 days to called me up and tell me about this.
wait, this is not the end yet, then i called back to the customer service, and ask them if the server is facing some problem, and try guessing their answer..."no sir, we are don have any problem on our server currently that might cause u that".
i am very unsatisfy with that answer, so i called again another day, and i complained about the customer service quality, and why they don even know that the server is having a problem, that service crew answer me with this answer--"sir, if i was the one who answer ur call, then i would have told u that the server is having problem"

what does this prove?? the customer service themselves don have any inter-communication to exchange info, and they are trying to push away the responsibility to someone else!
can u cal this good?? well, not for me
at least for streamyx u can still speak to a technician on the spot.

also,
do not change ppl's name as u wish just because u do not agree with what he say. if u feel like u wanna flame him, just drop him some fact that he is wrong about, make him speechless, not trying to do such stupid thing as insulting ppl's username
yeah yeah, although it's not his real name, but it still represent him...
what do u feel if i insult u and called u a funny or insulting names??

do not comment about my bolding again, cos this time he is really wrong, and i wanna bold this to remind other users also

yeah... next thing when we complain about the 20GB limit.. they will tell us.. we have loosen it mar... we initially put there 3GB in the fair usage policy...now we given you 20GBs.. so we are very flexible already...

the thing is.. this damn fair usage policy is never seen except for 2 places in the maxis wireless broaband section and www.maxis.com.my/maxisbb

5.2.3 The system that is used to provide the Maxis Broadband service can identify very high bandwidth users and Maxis seeks to manage the customer's usage by throttling their bandwidth to a much lower broadband speed to ensure fairness to all customers.

5.3.1 Each customer's total usage per month shall NOT exceed 3GB of data volume transmitted (total upload and download usage). This is to ensure that no individual hogs the bandwidth at all times.

best is... we were not even told by anyone when we signed up for it.. call us ignorant... but isn't it their job to show us if there are any clauses to registering for it...


anyways... i do hope your sources are accurate... if not... an ugly war is going to break loose and this is not fun..

second day after billing day, the speed is just awesome..
see how 'fast' it is..

huh?? maxis accept return if we got poor service?
no penalty for earlier termination meh??


nah.. the best speed i had today

This post has been edited by minami_blue: Mar 31 2008, 09:44 PM

Ooh...If u think maxshit is tat gud, build one avatar and start worshiping them, I wouldn't stop you.

By the way, butt-freezer also quite an appropriate nick to use in this matter, will freeze your butt until you can't sit well, can't sleep well and can't eat well.

Don't mention bout the speed they provide, when solely talking bout their customer service, it's truly amazing. They can even send someone that dunno anything bout network to do their network trouble shooting. We are the one that paying for their service, aren't we have the right to demand for a better service?

And I suspect this few ah keong, ah beng, ahmad, ah chan, wan, and etc is actually same guy. If you still getting too excited from our previous national election, I don't mind tat you all continue to cast some votes here. It's pretty obvious that most of the "No" votes are casted by real user, and the "Yes" votes casted by some fanbois. But I doubt that they are reading this, because they normally perform some hit and run tricks. If we definitely want to dig into this matter, all this posts will be definitely came from the same IP address.

The most important thing here, that I would like to say is: We are here to discuss a solution to get a better service from maxshit, not to get more flame from maxshit fanbois. If all this troopers or fanbois got so much free time to kill, why don't they juz spend sometime on improving the service.

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Added on March 31, 2008, 11:50 pmWhat butthead mentioned are quite true. Instead of explaning the contract to their customer during sign-up, their promoter choose to hide all these information away from the customer. Even though me and my friends got ask them bout the 3GB matter, what they told me is that not such thing in the agreement, and the broadband is definitely unlimited. Maxshit, stop telling fairy tales and admit that you conned us.

This post has been edited by bytefreezer: Apr 1 2008, 12:04 AM

I have an announcement to make, I noticed that suddenly there are many new members posting in this topic giving comments. After doing a further investigation, I found that the new members were all owned by the same person. Alright you know who you are so please do not continue any further activities like this or face yourself getting further action by us moderating team.

The list of the accounts owned by the same person has been included in the attachment.

This post has been edited by yongkailoon: Mar 31 2008, 11:56 PM


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