22
Jun/10
2

TM’s new HSBB

Last week I signed up for TM’s Unifi HSBB 5Mbps plan, and a few days ago the TM guys came to my house to set it up. Let me list down the steps that a Streamyx user needs to go through before signing up for Unifi.

  1. You need to call Unifi (1300881222) to inform them you want to sign up. They’ll ask you which plan and all other details. They’ll then schedule a time for the Unifi guys to come to your house to set up
  2. You need to close your Streamyx account. From a user point of view, this is plain stupid. A user simply doesn’t care if Unifi and Streamyx are 2 different business units in TM, because a user simply sees TM as 1 company.  Anyway, I had to go a nearby TM Point to fill in a form to close my account. Thank god the whole closing down experience was fast and smooth.
  3. A few days later the Unifi guys came to my house. They arrived on-the-dot as promised at 9:30AM and they were very friendly. The agreed SLA from TM is that the installation would take less than 6 hours (my guess is that they’re playing it safe), but turns out the actual installation took about 2 hours+. The Unifi guys had to pull another cable from the TM post outside my house and wire it directly to where I want to set up the Unifi box.

The unifi package came with 4 devices (photo below)

The tall grey device on the left is the TV Set Up box. It gives you 21 IPTV channels and TV-On-Demand (TVOD).  The small white box with 2 antennas is the wireless router, and the white box on the right is the modem. A cordless phone (black) comes with the package too. All these 4 devices and the installation process were free-of-charge from TM. Awesome.

The Unifi guys did everything. The wireless network was set up with all the appropriate security settings. They even helped me perform a speed test which the results was more than pleasing:

Yup, that’s right, I signed up for the 5Mbps plan but my actual speed is 6.4Mbps! Now my internet at home is faster than what I have at work! Youtube videos loading the point the page loads, and I was able to download a 1GB file for around 1 hour! That’s how fast it is! TM definitely got it right this time around. Well done TM!

2
Apr/10
0

HSBB Delivered

After a few months, the HSBB was launched a few days ago. It was one of the most anticipated events of the year.

Apart from that, I received an express mail from TM the week before stating that my housing area (TTDI) is part of the 1st phase deployment for HSBB, hence, I’ll be eligble to test HSBB (free of charge) till mid-May. Good stuff. Although, they should have used normal post instead of using registered post where I had to go collect it at poslaju depot in PJ (I don’t recommend going there during lunch hour, killer jam at the wretched Rothmans roundabout)

Although I have yet to experience HSBB, my usual Streamyx experience has improved tremendously. Check out the screenshot below: (usually my test returns a 200kbps average, but now it’s 300+kbps!)

New Streamyx speed

Anyway, I look forward to trying HSBB out. I went to their new HSBB website, http://www.unifi.my, and I believe I’ll be more than happy to sign up for the 5Mbps plan. Looks reasonble and I don’t see how I would be needing any bigger bandwidth than that.

However, earlier, I heard that TM was thinking of implementing a maximum download limit (at around ~60GB+ depending on package), but later the idea was scapped. Good thinking. We don’t want to spoil a wonderful project with petty limitations such as that. We should learn from the Australians (where their ISPs implements a download cap — only to receive hateful complaints from netizens in the country) and be better.

I’ll post again after trying out the new package.