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?

Actually there’s not many freebies I can get at the PC Fair. It’s all brouchers and flyers of price list and promotion.

There’s a big broadband war going on at the PC Fair, P1 Wimax gave a very big paper bag which inside consist only a piece of their promotion flyer. The paper bag was real big and it’s good to use as I used it to dump all my flyers.

Then at Maxis Broadband booth, they gave bag too, it’s a recycle environmental friendly bag with a promotion book and a piece of flyer. They got free sweets at their booth too. Great.

Digi, Celcom and Streamyx didn’t give any bag though.

Besides bags and brouchers, HP gave me a headband with Christmas hat decoration and a fresh scent thingy which give me to hang in the car to smells good. Now I got something interesting.

Lastly, I got a lot of balloons from Maxis Broadband and P1 Wimax. =D These were useless, but fun to be popped.

Or as a car decorations. =D

That’s the question, DiGi recently launches DiGi 3G Internet and connection in Klang Valley and the Klang Valley folks has pretty good deal at there. I shouldn’t say it’s pretty, it’s more than pretty, awesome, bombastic, huge, gigantic! Looking at the price of BlackBerry and the new Nokia N97 Mini, it’s selling for as low as RM99 and the DiGi’s latest Blackberry plan is cheap, when compare to Maxis and Celcom!

There’s limited unit and it’s all sold off very fast in the first hours. If I live in Klang Valley, for sure I’ll go camping at the mall already! They should come to Penang! Frankly, felt sad when I see them tweeting about it and I am so far away from Klang Valley.

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.

Yesterday, I took the bus to town and I was lucky to be in one of the 3 bus that offers free Wifi. The last time I was on this bus, the free wifi was not working. My iTouch was running low on battery so I took out my Nokia N95 to try the Wifi to see whether it’s working or not.

It worked! I was prompted with a Welcome Screen like those when you are surfing at Starbucks Coffee. Surfing the net on N95 is not fun because it’s hard to navigate around.

Surprise to see that the Wifi service is powered by DiGi 3G Broadband. I thought it was Celcom or perhaps P1 Wimax but good to see that it’s DiGi.

I did not surf a lot with the connection, just check on some Twitter, email, Facebook and Plurk.

The speed was quite fast for those mobile optimized site, I ran a speed test on it and found out that it’s running on the slowest 3G speed, it’s not even HSPDA yet. If so, I believe they are running on the 384kbps DiGi 3G Broadband package. For light surfing, I think the speed is pretty fast already.

Good to have such service on public buses, hope it can expand the service to other bus route. Now, it’s another reason for you to take the public transport.

I used to update my Twitter status on the go with Mobile Web Twitter, it’s a lot cheaper than sending an international text message to the USA to update your tweet. However, I have stopped using the mobile Twitter for quite some times already after I’ve found out about Malaysia Twitter SMS Gateway.

It’s not official from Twitter but created by some local avid Twitterer. There’s actually two of them and you can save your cost by just sending a text message to a local phone number.

S2Twit.com is the first Malaysia Twitter SMS Gateway and it’s up for quite some times already. There’s no integration with Twitter, you need send a text message to register your phone number with your username and password, then you can tweet with your phone’s text messaging system. It was a 018# number and they have updated to a new 016# number 2 months ago, which I believe it’s a Digi number.

So, it’s saving a lot of your money by sending text messages. If you are a DiGi Super SMS user, you can send unlimited tweets like me.

Just recently, I found out a new service called gladlyCast. It was from Singapore and they have just added a number for Malaysia user. It’s has nice graphic and easy registering on it’s site. It works with the Twitter Integration so it isn’t like registering your username and password into the database like S2Twit.com.

If you are asking me which is better, I got no comment on this, because the two do same thing. Depends on which telco you are using, if you uses Maxis then you go for gladlyCast, if you are on DiGi, then go for S2Twit.com.

Looking at the above Tweets, you can notice the difference about the Tweet where it was sending from.

This means that gladlyCast is more developed than S2Twit.com. Anyway, I am using both of the service because I owns two different number of different telco, I use S2Twit.com more because it’s 016 and the SMS rate is cheaper. =)

Follow me on Twitter @nicholaschan.