Even without having to stress about our problematic Internet connection here in Malaysia, any international or foreign expatriate living here would’ve realized our Internet connection is nothing compared to their home country.
Previously, someone from MDeC contacted me and asked my opinion of what could be limiting the potential of e-business in Malaysia. Educating Malaysia businesses on setting up Internet businesses is one but without reliable Internet connection, would you see a benefit of doing Internet business locally? Don’t even think about internationally if your Internet business is hosted in Malaysia.
Hence, I’m starting to see the death of Internet companies thanks to our Internet connection reliability – which isn’t reliable.
Alright, I can’t take it anymore so I’m going to stress this. Businesses are willing to pay good money for an average speed and reliable Internet connection. By average, in this day and age I’d say should be a minimum 2Mbps and above for businesses. Mind you, this is for the Malaysian culture and not Australia or even America where they’ve got Cable.
Here’s a scenario for you which is happening today. If the Internet connection is going to fail and it isn’t going to be working as it is within even 30-minutes, I could’ve lost upto RM10,000 (or more) in business opportunity already.
What’s worst is companies like TMNet are arrogant and dont’ realize they may be losing 80% of business themselves. And though Malaysia has Wimax providers now, most Internet business geeks know wireless connection hasn’t reached a stage of wired stability no matter how we look at it.
Therefore, as much as educating the market of Internet business is concerned. I’d highly advice fixing our problematic Internet connection woes before more Malaysia Internet companies die or move their headquarters outside of Malaysia.
Very true. It really affects our online businesses. And I believe it’s happening to both of us now. Mine sucker since I’m on public wireless (and not personal wireless).
I think that things are slowly changing for the better, with the eventual availability of wimax networks.
My larger concern which I believe is really restricting Internet businesses in Malaysia… is the lack of recognition by international payment gateways such as PayPal. Other alternatives which M’sian businesses have to bare with are either very expensive (WorldPay), or not as convenient. I’ve seen how easy it is to do things online and get businesses started up in Singapore – and feel that we are at a major disadvantage just because of that.
your tombstone looks like a parking meter la haha
i believe a reliable local payment gateway is a HUGE issue. we can go around the internet connection because I have never had internet connection issues. Plus usually I’ll host it somewhere else too. Never here. Its quite often I’ll get an email from one of my locally hosted servers that TM’s data centre crashed or something like that. And thats even why some of local web hosting companies has servers outside of malaysia right?
Unless you were talking about potential customers dont have a stable internet connection. In that case, internet companies will lose business.
yeah, and your tombstone STILL looks like a parking meter. lol.
Fath:
And if you’re dealing with a lot of international clients, you can bet it affects your activities.
Mike:
The payment gateway is definitely an issue. But it could also be linked to other issues like the seniors (old believers) governing the way we do things. To them, what’s not broken shouldn’t be changed. And even if we mentioned ways to improve it, they’ll turn a deaf ear as they just want to retire peacefully then carry on more responsibility.
Ikram:
It’s free clip art dude. Not my thing. :P
As for data centers, thank goodness we (Simpleet) prefer Singapore over Malaysia – anytime. Not sure if many realized, there has been complaints of international access being slow from overseas to Malaysia servers.
It’s not potential customers but the companies setup here with Malaysia servers and etc. As you’ve described, once the line goes down it renders a number of business immobile and business-less.
I even rant about our broadband connection in my sleep. Throughout the years, I’ve had to scrap or pass on web projects that require a stable, uninterrupted or reasonably fast internet connection. And that situation remains the same today. Our internet seems to be getting worse.
When the government decided to boost IT, internet remained the single most crucial backbone for success. A decade has past, other countries has left us in the dust. Pathetic.
Stanley Yeoh
I’m not surprised, Stanley. Though now I’m looking forward to see how TMNut is going to deploy and rollout Fibre To The Home (FTTH). It’s suppose to give us a leap in performance therefore I really want to see if they can meet the expectations this time.
sadly, internet infrastructure is one of the reasons why we decided not to open a Plurk development office in Malaysia. We looked at Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and South Korea and in terms of tax breaks, human resources and IT infrastructure, we are still way behind. As a Malaysian, it aches me to say this.
What Plurk development office?! Where in the world are you now then? LOL!
Anyway, I seriously don’t know who to blame for recent outages on my website. Tracer shows the stop at TMs building and I really want to believe that because their service is just…crap.
Right now, in Toronto =). The majority team members are here with a few spread out over in Denmark, Poland and Singapore.
We are not moving en masse to Asia :D. Just want to have a presence there by opening a branch.