Malaysia and The Fair Usage Policy

Someone once told me, “Malaysians are as kiasu (selfish) as Singaporeans”. And I can’t help but agree to it in certain situations I’ve been in. Plus, I’d like to admit personally, I myself don’t like abiding to certain limitations. One of it being; limited Internet download capacity.

However, everything happens for a reason and every action has a reaction. From my discussion with the PacketOne staff, I’ve come to understand why the fair usage policy is inserted and practiced in Internet providers – not only Malaysia. But, how much do you think our capacity should be limited?

What’s the fuss about having the fair usage policy?
The misconceptions of the policy if you overused your upload/download limit was (and still is) subscribers assume the providers will:

• Disable/Prevent/Ban you from using the Internet service.
• Slow your Internet to a crawl.
• Blacklist you as a consistent heavy user.

The above are some of the misconceptions whenever we start talking about the fair usage policy. However, through the discussion with PacketOne staff we’ve been briefed what is the fair usage policy really about and how it’s being implemented by providers – PacketOne, at least.

What the fair usage policy really means?
Well, the discussion brought up a lot of topics and here are the answers in short:

• It’s to NOT target BitTorrent users/heavy users. And Billy emphasized, P1 doesn’t discriminate P2P.
• It’s to ensure fairness for all users – everyone can browse the Internet without problems.
• The 20GB is the HIGHEST ceiling limit compared to other wireless competitors.
• If you hit the 20GB limit, you can still go online but priority given to other users who’s not reached their 20GB.
• Billy also explained, VPN services may not overcome the throttling as Wimax is hardware based – I asked if overriding the throttle via BolehVPN is possible.
• Fair usage to P1 is managing the bandwidth of users to keep customers happy.

For people in marketing, you may have realized instead of limitation, the word; manage, was used. Realistically, I’m still not all happy with the idea of limiting my bandwidth.

However, if PacketOne (or any other provider) can do a better job managing the users bandwidth than you know who then I’m all for it. Though, the moment it’s limitation starts affecting my experience, you bet I’ll be one of the few talking about it.

Especially when it makes customers say something like this:

If I am paying RM268 for a 4MB line and they limit it to 1MB so that other users get a fair share of the bandwidth, then what the hell they charge me for the amount?? If their infra cannot cater for heavy usage then don’t offer different packages at different prices…

Source: Richard

Therefore, I hope providers think it through before introducing any packages aimed at heavy users. We don’t need another issue as the above.

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