My Streamyx experience

An old tortoise found in the temple gounds, must be centuries old. Kek Lok Si temple, Penang, 2004.

Man getting fast internet connectivity sure does frustrate me sometime, this is especially the case in point when I was going through my Streamyx application. I'm living in Kota Kinabalu in a very student dense population housing area. When we first took residence here, we though we wanted to get Streamyx but all our calls to Telekom were greeted with the answer of either "Your area is a fiber network and thus we cannot supply you with out service currently as Streamyx requires a copper connection" or "Your house is able to receive the service but as there is a low demand for it now in your area we have not the node for your area, thus we will look into expansion in future once demand has risen".

Right that went on for 2 years as we sent letters for the waiting list and repeated phone calls. For demand sake I can't understand it, we reside in a high population density area with several large scale housing development, our area is located near the town center as well as a major tertiery education facility (UMS), student population is high, working adult population is high, family residences are in abundant, a high income bracket housing development is sited here, various new housing lots are being built and various businesses are located here, so why no demand? If this is true then the number of my friends that has been querying when the heck services would arrive at Taman Kingfisher must not be the 'needed' demand they perceived us to be. They forget that student buying power counts a lot in Kk (the shops catering for student needs such as food, photocopying, car rental, dobby and supermarkets report an instant drop in business during the holiday break).

Well after 2 long years, they finally said my application has been approved, that is after Telekom Sabah sent an official letter stating that my area still does not have the infrastructure and capability for it for services at this moment. I had to go call their hotline number at Putrajaya directly to get the matter cleared up. So we got everything set up and after the installation guy told us there might be a delay of a day or two before we can access it and that we need to call the headquarters for activation, we waited.

Still no sign of our being able to log on after a few days, I called Putrajaya and found out the guy gave us the wrong default username/password and they had to reset the whole thing and we had to wait another day for it. Fine, after so harrowing a time just to get fast internet access we had it. So far it has been ok, surfing has been fast I must admit. Just that a few days ago the 'Temporary service interuption' made it crawl like a tortoise (See picture above)! Man accessing the net for the past few days has been a trial, pages won't load, speed was worst than my old 26.4k modem performance and I just gave up on trying to blog (took me an hour just to post a single entry). Well I hope Telekom intends to look into the cause and ensure that it will never happen again in future. Better buck up else open up the broadband market to competition so that services can be improved.