TM Leads For The Briefest Of Moments, Then Decides To Follow

First, let’s get the brief accolades out of the way.  TM became among the first in the world to roll out fibre to the home (FTTH) with the implementation of its high speed broadband service yesterday.  The service was launched commercially and is now available in 4 launch areas, and TM is claiming in excess of 300,000 “premises passed” – which means that in excess of 300,000 dwellings have access to the newly launched UniFi service should they want to subscribe.

Make no mistake – from the planning stage to implementation, the time taken was short.  Singapore, our closest neighbour, is still in the stages of implementing their own fibre infrastructure, through a consortium called OpenNet.  As far as I’m aware, there is no commercial fibre based internet service in Singapore yet.  But we already have our own fibre infrastructure, ready for consumer use, today, albeit only in the 4 launch areas.  In this respect, TM should be applauded for doing a good job in laying the cables, getting the infrastructure in place, as well as making it commercially available.

But this is about as far as TM is willing to go in terms of leading the way.  Now that it has made its intentions known, it is more content to sit back and follow what the others have done in the internet service provider space.  Note this statement from TM’s group CEO:

Telekom Malaysia CEO Datuk Zamzamzairani Mohd Isa said at a press conference to announce the UniFi pricing yesterday that the measures were part of its Fair Usage Policy.

“This policy is a standard industry practice to ensure that all subscribers get to enjoy the same web surfing quality,” he said.

So, in one fell swoop, he brushed the issue aside by saying that bandwidth caps are a standard industry practice.  Yes, some ISPs are practising it (for example, in Australia).  And some are trying to implement usage caps in some way or another (for example, in the US).  However, there is one standard response from consumers worldwide – fierce resistance.  In the US, they have this website, amongst others, which is lobbying to put an end to all these usage caps in whatever form they might take.  Clearly we know it is not the way to go.

So, rather than spending time to think about a tiered pricing scheme, TM chose to take the easy way out.  Light users will subsidise heavy users, and heavy users will see their usage curtailed after exceeding the monthly quota.  I’d rather see a scheme where it is priced correctly – a tiered pricing scheme where you pay more if you consume more.  The nature of broadband is that the faster the speed, the more you tend to consume, because you can get things done faster.  I think that is human nature.  So, providing high speed broadband while having usage limits is like buying a Ferrari, to drive on our highways.  But then you are told that you can only drive 100km monthly at 250km/h, and after that, is restricted to 80km/h for the rest of the month.  What’s the point in buying a Ferrari then?

Comparisons between Singapore and Malaysia are inevitable – we know for a fact that our neighbours down south pay a far(?) cheaper price for internet access.  And their access, for the most part, is unmetered – ie. consume as much as you want, without having to worry about exceeding your monthly bandwidth allowance.  Singapore’s infrastructure is still mainly copper, in SingTel’s case, and cable-based, in Starhub’s case – technologies which are cheaper to implement than fibre.  But surely the difference in laying out the infrastructure cannot explain the great disparity in pricing as well as usage caps?  Did TM spend a proportionally large amount of the funds allocated to UniFi on laying the cables, and surprisingly found itself with little else to spend on expanding its international capacity?

What do you think?  Will UniFi be a success?  Or will a 2Mbps or 4Mbps without usage caps be more than sufficient for your use?  I know some people on a 4Mbps line who claim download 700GB monthly, to give you an idea of their consumption.  And they’re not people who supply “master copies” of movies to the movie pirates – they’re simply movie lovers!

So, the dare now for TM is to come up with an acceptable pricing scheme – show the world that we can lead in this area too, and not simply take the easy way out by saying “it’s industry practice, so we practise it too“.  We’re not expecting rates to be the cheapest in the world, but rather something that makes more sense.  Are you up to it, TM?

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