Telekom Malaysia Admits that its new Traffic Management System Needs Tuning

 

The bolehvpn site  brings the response of Izlyn Ramly, Telekom Malaysia VP of Corporate Communications (picture) regarding complaints from their customers on traffic management policies implemented recently in the Streamyx (broadband) service.

See "International Cap was likely a Bug: Room for Improvement" - here. 

"Of late, our traffic profiles are changing quite rapidly, and we are noticing that network congestion can hit different parts of the country at different times of the day or week. When congestion hits, depending on the usage patterns, customers subscribing to the same package but generating different traffic patterns may experience different levels of service performance.
 

In an effort to ensure a fair distribution of resources amongst all customers at all times, whenever congestion occurs, TM’s network is able to calculate how many users are active at any given time and allocate dynamically the resources across all customers with active sessions.
 
In rare cases of heavy congestion, we ensure that no customers may get below a minimum threshold of international bandwidth, but there is no ‘ceiling’ to the bandwidth each customer can get.
 
The problems some customer are experiencing now may have stemmed post a successful pilot of a new traffic management model we ran a few months before, following which we went nationwide about 3 weeks ago. Clearly there is room for improvement and we are working hard to resolve this.

As dynamic allocation of bandwidth requires some specific settings that need to be fine tuned area by area, we elicit and welcome feedback on the experience in different parts of the country at different times of the day. We have set up a special email account where you can send your readings for our review: impact@tm.com.my effective 1 December 2010."

According to Telekom Malaysia web site, Streamyx' Fair use Policy (FUP - here)  ".. automatically identifies the extremely heavy users and manages their bandwidth in order to protect the service of all our other customers. This traffic prioritization policy will protect the quality of service for the majority of our customers when they use the service, while at the same time, still allowing the extremely heavy users to continue to send and receive files with certain restrictions. With this policy in place, we will prioritize Internet activities like web browsing, live streaming, messaging applications and VOIP access while traffic to P2P sites will be given lower priority, due to the high bandwidth consumption of such services."