It’s pretty interesting to see the Maxis Broadband Windshield Sunshade on the cars at PC Fair. They really spent a lot on marketing. I like the tag “My car is as cool as my blog”. Somehow, if you are choosing for a broadband, choose smart. You should check out my speedtest at PC Fair. =)

I found out that the most interesting part about Penang December PC Fair is not about booth babe because they don’t have any here, but it’s the broadband booth. After coming through the entrance and walk for about 2 minutes and you will find the broadband company booth all side by side.

It’s really a big broadband war inside, when you passed by,

1. P1 Wimax (4G), they will ask you to POTONG (means cut in Malay)
2. Streamyx (Copperline ADSL) will ask you to upgrade,
3. Digi Broadband (3G) will tell you they have got no contract and free modem,
4. Maxis Broadband (3G) will tell you broadband discount for postpaid user,
5. and Celcom Broadband (3G) will tell you, nothing, in fact they just keep shouting Celcom Broadband at me.

They set up their booth nicely and they got a lot of promoters! One broadband company has like more than 20 promoters and I guess they are fighting to see who has hired the most promoter. They just keep shouting and calling you to join and subscribe their network.

I am a Streamyx user and I will still stick with Streamyx, I only change if there’s alternative for wired Internet, perhaps a new company that provides FTTH 100Mbps package at less than RM100 per month, for sure I will potong (cut).

P1 Wimax has got a nice booth, free big paper bag, plenty of laptop for Internet surfing, a lot of promoters and (some) nice girls giving out balloons.

The promotion that is interesting is the GET 1 MONTH FREE AND RM160 DISCOUNT. Discount is always better than getting a free Wiggy (P1 prepaid wireless modem.

I speed test their machine and got a 2.4mbps speed. Not bad, I can’t find any P1 10mbps Wiggy to try though.

Next up is Digi Broadband booth, with a lot of yellow colour promoters but no free gift. I believe Digi Broadband is the best 3G broadband provider in Malaysia, with fast speed, good service, and good price when compare to Maxis and Celcom, the other two 3G broadband provider.

Their promotion in PC Fair is PAY RM88 FOR EXPLORE PLAN (NORMALLY RM108) AND GET A FREE MODEM. NO CONTRACT. The best of their promotion is no contract where P1 is contract based.

And I speed tested too, with P1’s speedtest site. It shows that it has a 1.9, almost 2mbps speed, still hardly reach maximum of 3.6mbps of HSPDA network. This is nice because it’s faster than my house 1.5mbps line.

Streamyx’s booth didn’t interest me, they have got many promoters, but not as many as Digi and P1 have. So I went to speed test again and they got the fastest speed. Showing a 3.4mbps download, which I believe is running on a 4mbps plan. I want this speed and I want to ugprade, but I don’t have cash, so I need more sponsors. Hehe.

I am so not interested in Celcom Broadband, have heard a lot of bad comment about their service. The promoters don’t know their things around.

When I tried to speed test, the speed test site can’t even load and they told me they have got a lot of customer using their network so it’s slow. I got fed up and didn’t even get to speed test after waiting for few minutes. FAILED.

Lastly, I went to Maxis Broadband booth, green is their colour and they have balloons too. Actually I am also a Maxis Broadband user, using a 500MB data plan on top of my mobile postpaid line. Since it’s limited and pretty expensive, I only use it on the phone and not tethering it.

The speed test sucks again, showing only 187kbps which is less than 3G speed. Another FAILED one, at least I successfully ran the speed test. Their explanation of the slowness is many laptop sharing the same connection via a router, there’s a point, but still lousy.

Which broadband provider do you use and what do you think about them?

Was looking around the web and found out from a Tech enthusiast’s blog at Cnet about him beta testing Maxis FTTH (Fibre To The Home) service. So it seems like another FTTH provider is coming soon competing with TMNet and other little FTTH provider.

Looking at the download and upload speed, it’s fascinating and I love that. Unfortunately, all these sweet talks are just, er, sweet talks. Still haven’t see an official rollout of the service yet. Maxis was into broadband but looking at their 3G wireless broadband plan when compare to other service provider like Digi and Celcom, I would rather go for other because of the pricing.

More to come, as Maxis will be providing an IP phone for testing calls. Astro and Maxis are going to do a tie-up to provide HDTV through the optical modem. Finally, justification to buy an HDTV!

As for the HDTV, it’s mentioned from the BETA tester blog that it will be streaming through the Internet. Great! I care about HDTV in Malaysia more because we are so so lagging behind. Having a widescreen full HD tv at home is just useless without any HD channel. So let’s wait and hope it will come very soon.

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I signed up for Maxis Mobile Internet 500MB data plan for RM58 per month, but after a month of usage, I can hardly reach the 500MB limit usage. I turned on push email, push Twitter via Tweets60, sent a lot of picture email to awayfromcomputer.com, chat on Nimbuzz and surf the net, but the total usage was only around 240MB.

So guess, I’ll do YouTube surfing too to fully utilize my data plan. =D

DiGi offers a RM48 unlimited data plan which I think is better than other because it’s unlimited, somehow cheapest of all. Too bad, I am a Maxis postpaid user, I can’t change to DiGi, it’s a company line.

I got no idea what happened to the national biggest broadband provider, TMNet’s Streamyx. For the past two day, I couldn’t access a lot of international links. The Internet was not really down, it’s not unaccessible for everything but I just couldn’t go in some of my favourite sites.

PPS.tv was doing fine, downloading from Megaupload was good, but then international site like Google, Yahoo, Gmail, Twitter, Plurk, Lifehacker, Gizmodo and even our local most popular tech forum Lowyat.NET too, were really very slow.

I found out that this problem was only happening to Penang’s Streamyx user only. I found a proxy site Vtunnel to access Lowyat to check the status of other user, other state was doing fine.

Besides that, other service provider like Celcom, Maxis, P1 were doing fine. Since I have a 500MB mobile data plan on Maxis, so I plug in to the computer and tested the connection, it’s true that Streamxy was shitty for the past two day.

I use a N95 8GB, it’s not a good Intenet device but it’s capable to do a lot of thing with it. Recently, I just subscribed to the Monthly 500MB Mobile Internet Data plan from Maxis for RM58 a month to do my email, Twitter and some light surfing on the go.

In case you don’t know, I tweet and send a lot of photos to my mobile blogging site, Away From Computer. You can check it out too.

Because that my line is under the SME business plan, it troubled me a bit for to subscription and activation, I have to write in and call them for the activation, it’s pretty troublesome, but afterall, it’s activated and I am on.

I ran some speed test today via mobilespeedtest.com.

The first result I got was pretty shocking and suprised. The speed was rocket high to 8.5mbps. That was freaking cool but I realized that I was running the test through Opera Mini and Opera Mini has some sort of proxy to minimize site loading.

I re-run the test with the normal Symbian browser and the speed was not so satisfying for a 3G connection. It’s supposed to be 3.5G, running on HSPDA, with speed up to 3.6mbps but I didn’t see it goes near to it.

How’s your mobile internet speed? By the way, ignore the ugly keypad of mine, I am a heavy text user.