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Dato Zam Interview with BFM

Part on capping is at 37:41 into the interview.

Some excerpts:

Fair Usage means that all our paying customers means they should be treated fairly. Heavy users tend to hog the network at the expense of the non-heavy users. The challenge is how we can implement this best we can and so that it is truly fair for the customer.

On how he is going to resolve the capping issue?

We will find a way out immediately, today we are looking at some parameters that will allow the equilibrium of usage. If it’s still a challenge in the next 1-2 days, I’m going to pull that out first and then we will relook, get feedback from our users and see how we can do this better.

Updated with TM’s Official Response on the International Capping.

If you are still experiencing problems you should send your speedtest results to impact@tm.com.my on the 1 December 2010 onwards (e-mail is at the time of writing not up yet).

Best way is to enclose speedtest.net reports from SG and Cyberjaya and compare them with the other MY servers and TM’s own speedometer.

Quote from TM

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

Firstly, we apologise for the inconvenience that our customers are currently facing on our internet services.

We would like to assure all our customers 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. Currently UniFi is not affected, as it is a new premium service.

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 telco and celco industry practice. It is already in place in Malaysia amongst the mobile broadband players and aimed at making sure our broadband service is 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 higher and 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 rationalising the internet speed during peak periods (3pm – 1am).

Of late, our traffic profiles are changing quite rapidly, and we are noticing that network congestion can hit different parts of the country at different times of the day or week. 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.

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.

The problems some customer are experiencing now may have stemmed post a successful pilot of a new traffic management model we ran a few months before, following which we went nationwide about 3 weeks ago. Clearly there is room for improvement and we are working hard to resolve this.

As dynamic allocation of bandwidth requires some specific settings that need to be fine tuned area by area, we elicit and welcome feedback on the experience in different parts of the country at different times of the day. We have set up a special email account where you can send your readings for our review: impact@tm.com.my effective 1 December 2010.

From our analysis, the current traffic patterns are, for most part, in line with our expectations on traffic management, and the speeds being delivered should suffice for a smooth internet experience.

Where the internet experience falls short, 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.

From a market communications perspective, the FUP awareness campaign is already ongoing and we will further clarify as to the rules we are implementing – and why.

In fact, a bloggers briefing has already been scheduled for 17 December post our engagement with LYN and Kambingz earlier. About 40-50 selected bloggers will be invited to represent the wider blogger community to keep them abreast with our efforts to improve service delivery and customer experience overall, and to seek constructive feedback on these efforts. We hope to address, or at least start to address many concerns at this forum.

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

TELEKOM MALAYSIA BHD

Updated with New Info on How to Complain 28 November 2010!

PROBLEM

TM appears to becapping INTERNATIONAL traffic on certain Streamyx accounts. This has happened for perhaps the past 2 weeks or so.
This is regardless of

a) usage of the user (both low usage and high usage users are affected)
b) type of traffic (HTTP/HTTPS/FTP/P2P are all affected) as long as they are international

SYMPTOMS

1. The caps appear to be hard caps. There is NO fluctuation in speed, it just appears as if it’s maxed out at 50 kB/sec. Some 4 mbit users report being capped at 200 kB/sec and I have a 512 customer being capped at about 25 kB/sec and saw some 1 mbit customers having the same thing. It does look like an intentional cap as they are in common multiples.

2. No appearance of packet loss though at times there may be high latencies.

3. Speedtests to local servers except Cyberjaya are fine but speedtest to Singapore/Cyberjaya/any other outside server shows the hard cap speed.

4. This appears to be indiscriminate as it applies to ALL types of international transfers be it http/P2P/FTP.

5. Cap appears to come on a schedule where people are capped in the afternoon then uncapped in the evenings or vice versa. Schedule appears to be different for different people.

HOW YOU CAN HELP/RESOLVE YOUR ISSUE

The problems some customer are experiencing now may have stemmed post a successful pilot of a new traffic management model we ran a few months before, following which we went nationwide about 3 weeks ago. Clearly there is room for improvement and we are working hard to resolve this.

As dynamic allocation of bandwidth requires some specific settings that need to be fine tuned area by area, we elicit and welcome feedback on the experience in different parts of the country at different times of the day. We have set up a special email account where you can send your readings for our review: impact@tm.com.my effective 1 December 2010.

What this means is, if you feel you’re experiencing international cap symptoms, you should send your speedtest results to impact@tm.com.my (effective 1 December 2010).

Best way is to enclose speedtest.net reports from SG and Cyberjaya and compare them with the other MY servers and TM’s own speedometer.

Few Steps how to complaint

You have several ways of making sure this problem is resolved. First is through the official channels, secondly is through media and thirdly is through trying to get in touch with the big shots in the Government to bring this issue to their attention.

As most things, best to do it all at once so you don’t waste time if one avenue fails.

SKMM will not entertain your report unless you open a query with TM support first.

This is what you will get with a direct SKMM report:

With reference to your complaint no. 0618/11/10  regarding the above matter, we would like to advise you to first lodge the complaint to the relevant service provider (example: TM/Packet One/U Mobile/Maxis/Celcom/Digi etc) for their attention and immediate action to resolve the complaint.

In the event that you are not satisfied with the resolution of the complaint provided by the relevant service provider or your complaint remain unresolved, please forward your complaint together with the supporting document or any additional information (account number / report number / bill statement / mobile number or any other related information) to the Communications and Multimedia Consumer Forum of Malaysia (CFM) for further action.

Step 1

Open a support request with TM either through their helpline (100) or e-mail help@tm.com.my
Detail the problem with your speedtest results and show how only international connections are affected (speedtest.net with SG or Cyberjaya servers). Do not waste your time with ‘resetting modem’ etc etc. If you know how to, give ping reports.

Give them 2-3 days to respond.

Step 2

Assuming their response doesn’t solve your problem (which is the most likely case), open up a complain at CFM.

http://www.complaint.cfm.org.my/

Register an account there and then fill up the form:

Step 3

If all above fails, then go to SKMM and open a complaint there and hopefully with enough genuine complaints, we can force some action out of this hugely unethical and possibly unlawful throttling.

Media Contacts

Thanks to Roz Ariffin for the link
For Newspaper The Star, write your opinion about TMNet Caps here :

Mail : @THE EDITOR, Menara Star, 15 Jalan 16/11, Section 16, 46350, Petaling Jaya
Emel : editor@thestar.com.my

Utusan Malaysia :

Mail : Pengarang(ruangan Forum), Utusan Malaysia, 46M, Jalan Lima melalui Jalan Chan Sow Lin, 55200, Kuala Lumpur
Emel : forum@utusan.com.my

NST :

Mail : The Editor, New Straits Times, 31, Jalan Riong, 59100, Kuala Lumpur.
Emel : letters@nst.com.my

Please don’t forget to include your name, address and telephone number. Without doing this, all Malaysian people will not know about TMNet cap.

Twitter: RT this!

@TMCorp TM daylight robbery by arbitrarily capping broadband connections way below subscribed speeds. Pls RT http://bit.ly/gsEq5U

Government Contacts

1Malaysia Najib Razak’s Blog
NajibRazak’s Twitter

Credits To Reuben for bringing up this matter to public

Due to public comment via twitter and blog TM.Nut already put off the caps for now for VIP Packages. This is only temporary for now . So if you’re a heavy user just spend another RM 50 to get the Biz5 Packages so you can play safe. More will be updated soon