Tag: broadband internet

Bye Bye Unifi, Hello Maxis Fibre!

Unifi broadband has been taking customers for granted. It charges higher fees & forces IPTV subscription upon subscribers. Maxis Fibre, riding on Unifi’s backbone for the “last mile” presents a better & cheaper alternative where internet speed of 30 Mbps is consistently provided.

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After a lot of considerations and patience with TM’s Unifi broadband internet service, the last straw snapped. After yet another “throttling & upgrade” ploy where we experienced a typical  slow down of internet speed follow by another call to “upgrade to 50 Megabits per second (from 30 Megabits per second) for RM10 extra”, we made up our minds to switch.

TM-bill
With the final RM15 bill paid, officially our Unifi subscription ended!

What was stopping the switch

  1. Change of broadband provider necessitates a change in telephone number. But our landline only rings at most once a week! Hardly anyone will reach for any of us via our landline. We doubt most of our contacts even know our landline numbers! Thus the change of landline telephone number is no longer a consideration for us.
  2. The fastest (and cheapest, bit by bit) provider, Time dotcom may come to our residential area. I had contacted Time a few times, they could not say if their service will ever reach my part of USJ (they are at USJ 9 business centre already). Thus we would have to rule out Time as a potential replacement for Unifi. This leaves just Maxis Fibre. And Maxis Fibre did not get a good review when it was launched.

What favoured the switch

  1. Maxis Fibre has been giving a good promotion. For the same speed of 30 Megabits per second (Mbps), the price differential between Unifi and Maxis Fibre is RM40 per month. With a price guarantee of 24 months, compared to Unifi, we will be saving close to RM1,000.
  2. Unifi which forces subscribers to pay a minimum of RM25 extra for HyppTV that is devoid of good channels and hence not viewed by most “forced subscribers”. Thus this not only adds extra to Unifi’s bill but the bad taste felt by subscribers for being taken for a ride (as opined by this author before) is the driver that pushes us to switch. Channels being taken out suddenly with no replacements are the norm.
  3. Bouts of “throttling followed by offer to upgrade” became too frequent and this ploy got stale. We hardly get internet speed that is anywhere near the 30 Mbps that we have paid for.
  4. The poor customer service of TM Unifi with no-follow up after complaints by subscribers like us is another push factor.

Anyone wishing to switch will need to do so soon. I was informed by the Maxis people that this promotion will end soon .

Maxis Fibre’s deal… any good?

We are getting the same package of 30 Mbps speed as our previous Unifi package. The internet speed tests have always turn in a good result which ranged from 20 Mbps to 32 Mbps (Downloading) and 7 Mbps to 31 Mbps (uploading). Maxis Fibre essentially is riding on Unifi’s backbone for the “last mile” to the customers. The difference… it could be that Maxis Fibre is not as congested as Unifi.

This speed was recorded at around 4 pm, much faster than we ever get from Unifi!

We do not have to be forced to pay for any IPTV that we do not need. This together with the higher price for the 30 Mbps deal of Unifi means we are paying RM40 less (if we put GST as “zero rated” for both players).

We are still getting a landline. And unlike Unifi’s phone service whose landline phone calls are free only for landline-to-landline calls, Maxis Fibre gives us free calls to all networks, including mobile phones numbers. Thus Maxis Fibre subscribers like us will not have to pay extra if we use the landline to call mobile phones.

In addition (though we have not yet found out how to activate this service), Maxis Fibre gives us free subscription to iflix video on demand service.

The router that came with MaxisFibre is modern and functional.

So far, the internet speed is good. The router that came with the package gives both a 2.4 GHz and a 5 GHz wifi channel. But for some reasons, devices like our security webcams that need to be logged into the network at all  times have issues with this router. Luckily we have another router for these devices to logged on to and this solved the problem.

How much of our lives revolve around the internet?

Two days ago when I woke up in the morning, after all the chores and usual morning exercises, I dutifully switched on the laptop. The internet speed was snail pace at first, then it drop to a crawl and virtually “died” within 5 minutes.

At first I thought it must have been my broadband router playing. After switching off and on, reset, reboot etc. access to the internet was still sporadic, all these while we could get our phone and IPTV services (which are tied to the broadband fibre optic from the ISP).

Then my son announced that he accessed his twitter account on his smartphone and found out that the main ISP in Malaysia which we subscribe to has suffered some issues on its DNS servers. Apparently the whole of Malaysia where this ISP is the main player was experiencing interruption in internet access.

For 4 hours I was only relying on my mobile internet to access my usual diet of information, emails etc. But I was not able to write much, which I usually do. Worse, I wanted to accessCoursera to take my MOOC class on “Genes and human condition” where some work/quizes were due. Although I have 5 Gb data plan from my mobile telephony service provider, tried as I had, taking a MOOC class using the Android apps from Coursera was not an enjoyable experience. I realised that I was suffering from withdrawal syndrome of “internet access denial”, albeit partially as I still had my mobile data to do at least some “minor” work.

A few things that I can conclude from this:

  1. Our lives today is inextricably tied to the internet. A lot of work and business transactions cannot be carried out adequately without internet access.

  2. There is still a place for the PC/laptop for work despite the advances in mobile internet and tablet/smartphone technology. You just can’t type or interact well on a tablet, especially if you want to take your MOOC classes. Try doing all those image editing on your smart phone and then export it to your blog, you will know what I mean.

  3. It pays to have a back up in the form of mobile data access. But if these mobile ISP are tied somehow (the last mile syndrome?) to the country’s main ISP and if this ISP is suffering an outage, you are done. However, at least in Malaysia there are a few mobile ISP to choose from and access is usually not excessively costly.

This brings me to another point, since I rely so much on the broadband to do my work, why am I subscribing to a 5Gb mobile data package and using less than 1 Gb of it each month? It is about time I review this and when the contract ends, I should switch to a cheaper data plan!

Footnote: This article is contributed by Dr. YN Chow. It is also published on Linkedin.