Personal Blather!

As much as I hold my country in high regard, there are a good number of things which I seriously feel it is lacking, and that's to say their not even TRYING to improve. Right now, as I am typing this up, I'll mention that it took me a whole 15 minutes to get to this point, where I can actually write something to post. It's one of the biggest thing I dislike about coming back home. To put it succinctly,

Malaysia internet connectivity hasn't improved since the invention of the 56k modem.

To its credit, Malaysia was one of the first country to have internet connection in the region. Unfortunately, just like every other 'project' in the country, that's as far as it gets. Since then, we have progressed into 'broadband' internet, or so we thought.

The unfortunate fact is that service providers here couldn't care less about improving their service or actually offering services that benefit users. The only widespread broadband service in the country is Streamyx, which has a reputation for being extremely sluggish, bad support, less than satisfactory bandwidth and even worse uptime. It is unfortunately, one of the only available and affordable avenues for 'broadband' access in the country, and everyone has to subscribe to it, like it or not.

While I've been away in Singapore the past six years, the service has NOT improved at all. If anything, the years have made it worse, since they keep asking for more and more people to sign up for it, but do not upgrade the infrastructure to support the additional users, resulting in a bottleneck in connection speed for ALL users. God only knows where the money subscribers have been paying have gone to since it's obviously not used to increase the reliability and speed of these connections.

Personally, I'm using an alternative 'broadband' solution offered by Jaring called SOMA. To be perfectly honest, it's pathetic. I can't even get a decent connection to do my holiday assignments, let alone try an MMOG. Loading pages take ages, sometimes taking even longer than the good old 56k. Perhaps it has to do with the location of the wireless modem, but the fact is still that I cannot get a reliable connection when I need it.

The fact that a website like this exists goes to show that I'm not the only one having gripes. Most people would complain about Streamyx because it's the most widely available option. Unfortunately for me, the alternative doesn't seem all that great either.

Perhaps I'm just asking for too much. After all, I do use my campus connection when I'm in school. That cannot be compared to the connections in private homes. Unfortunately, I am pretty sure connections in private homes in Singapore are pretty decent, as there are rarely any disgruntled customers, at least when it comes to connection reliability. Competition in Singapore is open and has driven prices down yet increased the quality of services. I'd have hoped that Malaysia wouldn't be too far behind in this area. After all, we also have rival telco wars just like our neighbours down south.

Wishful thinking...