BolehVPN News/Status/Fun

We will be consolidating US-SurfingStreaming and Obama into one server which should improve performance for several reasons:

1. US-SurfStreaming is underutilized and located in a datacentre that’s inland into the US which increases latency a bit. Our new server will be in Seattle where the undersea cables land in the US.
2. Our new server is on a gigabit port which will help both Obama and US-SurfingStreaming
3. It’s also on one of the premium providers in the US
4. The new server has a higher spec with more RAM (at 8GB) and CPU power which should easily accommodate both.

We’ll update you once we have finished configuring this server

TM in the past gave 1.5 mbit in general to all users but it seems that some users have had their connections pushed down to 1.0 mbit although they were previously enjoying 1.5 to 2.0 megabits.

oh ya.. btw, the other day i PMed you about my bolehvpn connection was at low speed. previously i managed to get about 180kbps download, nowadays only 110kbps at max.

i found out that my streamyx download speed has reduced from 1.5M to 1.0M. I think TMNet has reduced that. that’s why i get only 110kbps nowadays.

This from one of our customers…so if you’re having low speeds, best to check first if TM has reduced your speed by doing a test at Speedtest.

In a recent Twitter post, TM has removed the bandwidth cap on HSBB @ UniFi for now. With so much invested in making available HSBB and TM eager to get new subscriptions it is of course worried when the general feedback from the public was outrage at the bandwidth caps. After all, how are they going to get new subscribers if there’s so much negative press? There have been some calls that this was due to the power of social media, but I also have a feeling that it has a lot to do with the press’ decision to vocalize these opinions (see TheStar’s report).

However I suspect that this is not the end of the issue. TM is the company that installed P2P throttling devices despite public outcry. The fact is that there wasn’t a valid alternative provider and that’s why they could afford to do that. Its loss in revenue from pissed off customers (who probably couldn’t afford to cancel in any case) were offset by the massive savings in bandwidth. Now who’s to say they won’t slap the bandwidth cap back on once HSBB has a higher take-up rate and you’re already bound with your 12-24 months with them? What are you going to do? Not pay and  be internet-less in protest? Good luck with that.

It’s also worth nothing that TM can’t even get their UniFi site together. It refuses to display on Firefox despite updating to the latest Flash player.

Note the additional 's' at the bottom

Even on IE8, although it loads, it shows a code error and clicking in the Packages does not seem to do anything!

Love the boy's expression

Launch day wasn’t that much better:

Let’s see a year or two down the line how this pans out. For now, I’ll be still trying to get my damn 4mbps…

Just bought this game and so thought I’ll host a dedicated server as well

You can find this server at 202.71.97.81:27015

Yes this server will only accept original copies Hope to see you sometime over the weekend!

Comic from Halolz.

Check this out…looks like unlimited broadband for Malaysian users might be a thing of the past with the new HSBB @ UniFi plans imposing a bandwidth limit. Somehow an unlimited 4 mbps Streamyx connection despite the higher price seems to be a better proposition for the heavy downloaders.

Now the big question is whether they would still throttle P2P on top of the bandwidth caps? We welcome users who have HSBB/Unifi to give us some feedback on this.

As for Hypp.TV (with the a lame tagline of ‘It’s a Yoonic experience’ or is Yoonic the actual product name?), channel selection is poor and doesn’t look like it’s going to replace Astro anytime soon.

During the power outage in Luxembourg when the servers came back on, some of their services didn’t resulting in Proxy Connect Errors when connecting to the Gurren server. This has now been rectified! Sorry for the inconvenience!

Colossus is now back up. Files have been retained! Expiries of all Colossus seedbox users have been extended by 1 day as the downtime was less than 24 hours

You may need to start rtorrent if you changed your password (most users have had their rtorrents restarted already by us).

Thanks for the patience!

Remember my post about my Alienware M11X fiasco? On March 8, I received this e-mail which confirmed my cancellation:

Dear Reuben,

Thank you for contacting Dell Customer Service.

As per your request, we have cancelled your order# [7044269].

Please allow 1-2 weeks for the payment to be cancelled and credited back to your account.

If you would like to place a new order, you can call our sales department on (MY) 1800 88 0301 / (SG) 1800 394 7486

Thank you.

Today after about a month of waiting, the Alienware arrived despite the above cancellation…Oh gawd! Now to decide whether I want to accept it and open it or to return it.

Unfortunately it looks like the power outage in the Luxembourg datacenter due to their UPS blowout has resulted in some serious problems with the Colossus server. In the worst case scenario we would have to reinstall the entire server. We are working to see if we can recover the data if possible.

We apologize for the inconvenience and will keep you updated on further developments.

Update: We expect the downtime to be 24 hours at least. We will edit your expiries accordingly with a credit of 2 days. We expect to be unable to recover the downloaded files as well as the HDD may be totally gone.