I would like to express my disappointment with regards to TM Net's business practice. I know and understand that for a big chunk of the country, they enjoy a monopoly of 'broadband' Internet service but that should not stop them from providing excellent service. Sadly, like most Malaysian businesses it does.

After being abroad on two different continents, I now know why we will find it hard to compete at the international or global level. I think it's not because lack of expertise but more of lack of respect to paying customers.

It's now known that the Taiwan earthquake, unfortunate as it was, was used as an excuse by TM Net. I specifically mean here the access for their P2P services, be it Gnutella or Bit Torrent. Though the reason behind capping bandwith is understandable, at least TM Net should have take precedent from other ISPs that capped P2P, namely by:

  1. Announcing to their customers of the intent to cap.

  2. Set aside a capping time, say 9am to 12 midnight, where bandwith is considered a premium and;

  3. Allow a reasonable speed of maybe 20-30 kbps.

It is also known amongst users that not only P2P is being strangled to death but also IRCs and NNTP. What about those who have to pay their monthly dues for MMRPGs (Everquest, WOW, etc) which is pretty useless since the servers are all abroad?

This is totally unacceptable for a single fact that it was not specifically mentioned in our agreement and there is no 'novation' of an revised agreement. This sly underhanded tactic, I believe, amounts to cheating, and had it been overseas, TM Net would have been sued its pants off.

Notwithstanding regarding all this is the exact date for 'return' of service which has been shifted from Jan 20 to 23 and now to Jan 29. Lo and behold, came Jan 29 and even the 'Announcement' page was taken off so that we don't even know now when to expected service returns.

Any news of TM Net refunding or reimbursing customers for the downtime? Fat chance.

TM Net can decide what it wants to do and what direction it wants to take but do tell the customers what is happening and be transparent. Let then those who are fortunate enough to be able to choose, choose wisely. Those who can't - like me - will just migrate to the minimum package of 512 kbps then, since in all honesty, who needs a 1 Mbps line just to read online newspapers and blogs?

The future is here, especially with streaming content be it music or movies. But it looks like with other things in Malaysia, we 'appear' to have vision, but in reality we are just a bunch conservative sloths who don't know nor want to move forward with time.