This is the only conclusion i come out with after reading the news article about Telekom Malaysia’s latest buzz, the so called high speed broadband called UniFi. There are three packages offered by TM, entry package called VIP5 offering 5Mbps speed at price RM149 with a monthly download cap at 60GB, VIP10 package offers 10Mbps speed at price RM199 with monthly download cap 90GB and VIP20 offers 20Mbps speed at price RM249 with download cap of 120GB. For some reader’s information, download cap is the limitation on total size of all downloads. A brief look at i one would already find the price is on higher side.
Besides, if you listen enough what others say, there are fine lines and limitations in the service. The monthly download cap is further break down into daily cap. Not really sure how daily cap is being calculated and allocated to the customer but a guess will be to have the 60GB (VIP5) cap divided through number of days in the month, says 30. Divide 60GB by 30 days, user will only get 2GB cap per day, there will be a cap for each day, then does it mean those unused capacity will burn as days go by? Not sure, we will continue this article assuming a fixed daily cap is allocated. Let say you only use 100MB for day one but you can’t use 2.9GB on the second day since there is 2GB daily cap, and imagine if you are off to somewhere for a week and you can’t utilize your unused capacity, that sucks.
Download cap is probably the standard practice of the industry to have fair share of the internet bandwidth, but a compare to the three packages one would find that the download cap is unfairly allocated to the three packages. If you use a pencil and paper, you will figure out the VIP20 is the most overpriced package among three at the same time undervalued, not because of the price tag RM249. Let’s look at VIP5 with 5Mbps speed and capped at 60GB, the ratio of speed to cap is 1-12 (i ignored the unit of measurement for simplicity), now look at VIP10 with 10Mbps and capped at 90GB, the ratio of speed to cap is 1-9 (ratio becomes smaller) and VIP20 with 20Mbps and capped at 120GB, the ratio of speed to cap is 1-6 only! This is not acceptable, with higher download speed, the capacity is lowered?! No wonder TM try to implement a daily cap, probably they worry people will finish the download limit in first week of the month, and user with higher speed will probably finish it earlier if daily cap is not in place.
I’m not too surprised by the CEO’s statements on negative responses of package bundles, where the package is compulsorily come with IPTV (which being circulated that it might take up large part of the price that being forced over to subscribers). The CEO said “it is all bundled and no a la carte”, customer will have to take whatever that are offered (which will be the conclusion of this article and how i came up with the title). Knowing Malaysians’ whatever service providers this much, i don’t really expect the services will be superb or even up to standard but still his statement leave no backdoor for future improvement which is criteria for a good provider. It does not sound like it is intended to be improved. As this service is newly launch, subscribers are low or even none, when could be the best time to listen to the customer? I will say now is the time to listen to customer’s requirements, not force things onto customers because some high level management people in TM thinks it’s too late and costly to change the package configuration, managements might also worry triggering many bureaucratic processes within the corporation and shareholders. There is no better time as good as now when the cost of changing is still low, when there are not many customer affected, when the product is still new and of course this is the time to win over potential customers that will likely be turned off if TM don’t do the right thing.
So if you are interested in subscribing TM HSBB, having read this article, you probably feel as frustrated as me. But this is Malaysian service, that’s all we have, take it or leave it, because we have no choice.