That was my initial reaction anyway when I saw the latest advertisement from Celcom touting their wireless 3G broadband service. It’s in the fine print, and as I always wanted to be a lawyer, I normally read the fine print, because sometimes, there’s a lot of gems in there, more so than those big words in the advertisement themselves.
So, check out the advert below. It’s on page N5 in today’s Star newspaper. Celcom claims that while they have a fair usage policy of 5GB monthly, irrespective of which plan you’re on, they don’t deny you service if you go over limit. Denial of service means they deny you service completely, obviously. Which means, they cut you off. Which means, you can’t connect if you use up more than 5GB monthly. No, Celcom doesn’t do that. But they do throttle you down depending on your plan – if you’re on the cheaper plan, it’s throttled to 64kbps, best effort, and on the more expensive plan, 128kbps, best effort. Most times, you probably won’t even approach anywhere near those “best effort” speeds, haha. Some would of course say that 64/128kbps is already denial of service – after all, who in their right minds would want to use the internet at those speeds? Even my puppy laughs at those pitiful bandwidth!
So, are they making this claim because other carriers, specifically Maxis, DiGi and U Mobile deny their users service if they above the monthly data allowance? Not as far as I know – all practise bandwidth capping like Celcom. And if they do, then what’s the point of Celcom advertising this fact then – is it to “fill up white space” so the advertisement doesn’t look devoid of any useful information?
And of course some would say that even without breaching the monthly data quota, the wireless broadband speeds in this country is also akin to denial of service!
Have your say! Please, keep those insults polite – I have no wish to spend my Chinese New Year editing rude comments!
