Its been a common problem since the birth of DSL in Malaysia.

Everyone’s talking about it. Even kids in school says “TM Net sucks” before even knowing who they are!

Imagine the internet as the Federal Highway during rush hour. You got your Ferrari FXX, fuelled with V-Power to the brim ready to pedal to the metal! Well, you can’t.

Despite having the fuel (Data waiting to be downloaded), the vehicle (fast computer & servers on the other end), the limiting factor is the highway (internet pipe).

You see, internet bandwidth is VERY expensive. Even if you have one billion ringgit right now (that’s RM 1,000,000,000) you probably could buy yourself 2-3 pipes, each to Hong Kong and Singapore and one locally. Then what? You got lets say 3 x 100mbit of bandwidth at your disposal. And enough money to pay for the recurring data fees for 24 months. There goes a billion!

But you got to remember, the pipes only ship your data to these Point of Presence (POPs) or Internet Data Hotels. Beyond that, your data is at the mercy of the gods of the internet data handling and routing. Thankfully, the TCP/IP protocol has the intelligence to get your data all the way to its destination, with up to 30 hops. It travels through that much switches and servers before actually reaching the intended destination.

So why does Japan, Sweden, and dare I suggest, Singapore have uber fast internet connections?

1. Population density. Dense areas are ISPs wet dreams. The more people you can reach per square kilometer, the more people you can hook up to with minimal infrastructure costs.

2. Investment in technology. The telephone lines we are using are at least 50 years old technology. They may have been laid not long ago, but still, it is like the “Steam Engine” of computers from back then.

3. Management & Piracy. We are greedy people. When they say Unlimited internet access, it means we can waste. Because we paid for it! This model of all-you-can-eat internet access does not work anymore. Last time, it was okay because there wasn’t enough content. The only time we needed 1 megabit was downloading 10 MB patches. Instead of waiting 30 minutes, we get it done in 3 minutes. Nowadays everyone knows P2P,  and ISPs are shitting bricks.

Once we solve problems 1-3, then we face the pricing issue. At RM 88 for 1mb/s, that’s DIRT CHEAP! Our ringgit is weak, so our bandwidth bidding power is also weak. Say Singapore is willing to pay higher for higher priority routing. They play WoW with Americans, getting 150ms… Malaysia only get 2nd choice bandwidth thus pushing our ping times to America to 250ms. Mind you, that’s not Transfer rate, rather the time for a frame of data to do a round-trip. That’s 67% faster than us!

If a Singaporean with 1mbit connection were set to do a set of common everyday task, like MSN, e-mail, Facebook and check the news, a 1 hour task would take a Malaysian 1 hour 45 minutes to complete just because of “latency”.

DSLreports.com is one of my favourite sites. It tells you the Broadband scene around the world. It has this cool feature that figures out where you are, and guesses your ISP and see what people are saying about this.

Our ISP is so slow they think its Wireless. Comment 1 is awesome. A “Wi-fi coffee shop” uses TM backbone. Comment 2, Dialup is hell, and he still wants that shit?

The most common problem is modem / computer settings.

Here’s a Pip Po Top Tip. If your friends complain of “slow internet access”, then them that they must be watching porn. When their computer is infested with malware, naturally it will bring down their internet access speeds!