This is the official response about the current problems everyone’s been having from the office with of Izlyn Ramly, VP of Corporate Comms.

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.

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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

Fair Usage Policy

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TM is committed to ensuring our customers receive the best broadband service at the most competitive price. To achieve this goal, we provide a contended broadband service. This means our Internet bandwidth (capacity) is catered to be shared by all our customers at any one point in time, to ensure we provide a satisfactory and acceptable performance on an equal basis to all our customers.

However, a small number of customers use more than their “fair share” of the Internet bandwidth provided by us. On average, about 10% of our customers are using a disproportionate amount of Internet bandwidth. These customers degrade the performance of our broadband service by taking bandwidth away from other customers, who use the service fairly.

For example, some customers use P2P or file sharing software, which constantly sends and receives videos and other types of very large files, throughout the day. These activities (download and upload continuously) use a lot of bandwidth and can significantly reduce the connection speed, which other customers are getting to access the Internet during peak hours. We don’t believe this is fair to the vast majority of our customers.

We wish to bring to your attention our traffic prioritization policy with regards to P2P and Fair Usage Policy. We would like to reiterate that the P2P throughput is subject to peers (seed) availability and their throughput as well.  Kindly note that TM does not have any control over peers’ availability or throughput.

The Fair Usage Policy automatically identifies the extremely heavy users and manages their bandwidth in order to protect the service of all our other customers. This traffic prioritization policy will protect the quality of service for the majority of our customers when they use the service, while at the same time, still allowing the extremely heavy users to continue to send and receive files with certain restrictions. With this policy in place, we will prioritize Internet activities like web browsing, live streaming, messaging applications and VOIP access while traffic to P2P sites will be given lower priority, due to the high bandwidth consumption of such services.

We wish to also highlight that as an Internet Service Provider (ISP), TM only provides access to the Internet and does not guarantee content delivery and performance where it is not within the domain of TM as an ISP. In fact, our international traffic management policy is designed to cater for all our customers so they have an optimal surfing experience within the normal limits of Internet usage.

As our priority is for all our customers to have a positive Internet experience, we wish to emphasize that it is important for all our customers to practice responsible usage of the allocated bandwidth based on normal usage.

We would like to reiterate that we are not against the use of P2P but we would like to educate our customers that the usage of excessive P2P does impact the overall service availability to our other customers.

TM does provide every customer with an allocated bandwidth, where other customers may use when not used by the others.  Unfortunately, the nature of P2P more often than not, takes more than their allocated bandwidth, thus causing undue setbacks for other users when they want to use the service.

As a responsible service provider, we believe it is our responsibility and commitment to educate and encourage responsible usage of the infrastructure we provide.

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