BolehVPN: Freedom Through Security

TM has posted another announcement that there is another submarine cable circuit fault on the AAG:

Telekom Malaysia Berhad (TM) wishes to announce that there has been a disruption of its Internet services due to circuit faults on the Asian American Gateway (AAG) submarine cable network at Lantau in China and at the domestic international link at Genting Sempah, Pahang, linking Malaysia to the United States (US) and Hong Kong.

Due to this, customers using Internet services may now experience slow browsing while accessing content hosted in the U.S. and Hong Kong. In addition, customers using other IP services such as Virtual Private Network (VPN) and other critical business applications linked to the U.S. and Hong Kong may also experience some service degradation.

To alleviate the problem, some of the links have been rerouted to alternate routes to ease the congestion.

During the restoration process, traffic to Northern America and Hong Kong may experience minor degradation while traffic to other countries is not affected. TM will make further announcements on the progress of the restoration works.

TM wishes to assure its customers that it is undertaking all necessary measures to restore communications services for its customers as soon as possible.

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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…

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Just went to the TM site and noticed a countdown happening:

Clicking on it brings you to the HSBB teaser site which really doesn’t tease much since it’s just a bunch of text but lends us to believe that either HSBB is going to be launched then OR that HSBB’s details will be finalized then:

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Some humorous pictures of the AAG cable system taken from their website:

Balloons!

Guy fixing balloons!

Damn I wish I had some balloons!

Here you go! HUGE BALLOONS!

Balloons Deploy!!

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A damaged undersea cable has affected connectivity for Malaysian customers to the US, Singapore and HK region and as such internet connectivity to such regions will be affected. Please note that despite the report below, links to Europe may be affected as well due to the rerouting of US traffic through the alternate lines.

This is particularly humorous considering that the AAG cable system is less than a year old! Obviously bad positioning… For more information on the AAG, you can read it up here.

Taken from The Star

KUALA LUMPUR: Telekom Malaysia Bhd’s (TM) Internet service was disrupted by a damaged underwater cable circuit at the Asian American Gateway (AAG) in Lantau, China.

In a statement issued yesterday, TM said due to the damage at AAG, which links Malaysia to the United States, customers surfing websites hosted in Hong Kong and the US would be experiencing slow connection.

Those using Internet protocol (IP)-like virtual private network (VPN) and critical business applications linked to Hong Kong and the US might encounter service disruption.

The statement said to overcome the problem, several Internet lines were directed to alternative connections to reduce traffic congestion.

With repairs under way, traffic to North America and Hong Kong would experience disruption while traffic to other countries would remain the same.

TM customers can report problems by calling the 100 line and choose “Internet service” or sending e-mails. — Bernama

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