Malaysia's broadband quality is below par, says Oxford study

By Leslie Lau
Consultant Editor

KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 2 - Malaysia was ranked a poor 48 out of 66 countries for Internet broadband quality in a study conducted by Oxford University and sponsored by Cisco.

The global study on broadband quality conducted by Oxford's Said Business School listed Malaysia among countries which had Internet speeds which were "below today's applications threshold."

Malaysia is listed in the same category but above countries like the United Arab Emirates, Philippines, Pakistan, Morocco, Vietnam and Indonesia. China, Malta, Brazil and Thailand are among countries just ahead of Malaysia in broadband quality but still in the same low category.

Countries like Singapore, Britain, Australia, Spain, Turkey and the Ukraine were listed above Malaysia as having Internet speeds "meeting needs of today's applications."

This article basically confirms the fear that we all have about the Internet connectivity in Malaysia. It sucks, the higher-ups know about it but can't be arsed (corruption? cronism? monopoly?). This article was written by the CEO of Jaring in 2006 but to date, nothing has improved.

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The need for alternative routes suddenly popped up after being shocked and shaken by the earthquake in Taiwan. Most people now realised that almost all our communications life-lines are passing through the earthquake prone areas. As Murphy's Law says, "anything that can go wrong will wrong at the wrong time". While we are taking a little year-end rest, we are shocked by the "Internet Tsunami". 
Malaysia is served directly by a few undersea fibre optic cables that land on Malaysia's shore. These include APCN (Asia Pacific Cable Network), SEA-ME-WE (South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe) and FLAG (Fibre optic Links Across the Globe). Unfortunately many other cable systems do not land in Malaysia. Our neighbour has taken much a more strategic approach long time ago resulting in many more cable systems landed over there. I always feel uneasy about this shortcoming for many years since I became involved with the Internet. As a result, we have very few alternatives for totally independent sub-marine cable systems to go out of the country. The situation is really scary. 

Even within the country we still need to do a lot of things to improve our diversity. I still remember an old story where we wanted to have two independent links from Semenanjung to East Malaysia. So we took two rather expensive long distance lines - Johor Bahru-Kuching and Kuantan-Kota Kinabalu. Little did we realise then that the Johor Bahru-Kuching was actually served via Johor Bahru-Kuantan-Kota Kinabalu-Kuching as there was only one fibre between Semenanjung and East Malaysia. So when our Kuantan to Kota Kinabalu link went down, both links were down. Our carefully planned diversity went into smoke. 

Back to the current problems, here are two diagrams depicting the failures on two of the major cable systems that I happen to know. 

The four failures indicated above are already enough to isolate communications infrastructure of the South East Asia and Hong Kong from the rest of the world. The situation is much worse when we have many other failures occurring at the same time near the same place. 

For Malaysia, similar cable cuts anywhere to the east will have devastating impacts as we are experiencing now. The alternative is to use other cable systems to provide adequate route diversity at all the time. But which cables? 

To be truly diversified a country or a service provider must use at least two cable systems (the more the better) where (a) each one is operated by completely independent operator (b) no portion of one cable system is shared with the other (c) the two cables are physically separated from each other by at least a few hundred kilometre throughout the whole of the protected route. If these tests are done on the existing cable systems being used today, almost all will fail. 

Such independent routes are already in existence today. One route is through the familiar Hong Kong - Taiwan - Japan. Another route is through India, the Middle East and Europe. Two cable systems, SEA-ME-WE and FLAG run from Europe through South East Asia to Japan. However, the capacity on the westward route is not adequate to serve the current demand. This has pushed up the price and forced almost every one to live with an affordable but risky situation. In my view, a service provider can take such risk. But a country should not. 

This is an issue to be pondered in months to come. Meanwhile I have been informed that at least fives ships are now working to repair the damaged cables near Taiwan. The sea condition in the area is very rough. It could take 7 to 10 days to repair a cable if everything works as planned, weather permitting. In parallel, temporary circuits are also being put in place to ease the current congestion. As for JARING, we now see 100% higher capacity compared to yesterday. It is however still about 40% of the normal capacity. 

Dr Mohamed Awang Lah is the CEO of Jaring Communications Sdn Bhd. He was involved in the thenemerging Internet technology about 25 years ago, which led to the pioneering of the Internet services in Malaysia. This article is written in his personal capacity. - 30 December 2006

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I have experienced that feeling of panic and helplessness when my mobile accidentally got wet  (read thrown into the pool).

If only I got this forwarded email at that time. I could have at least saved myself a few hundred bucks.

(Source: Unknown)

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Another update: Managed to export my Wordpress blog to Joomla with a little help from my programmer who customized an application for this purpose. All 437 posts exported to .sql format and now I've an option to export all published, draft and private entries. Good eh?

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This is a simple user guide for those who wish to use the WordPress (WP) converter to export all you previous posts from WP into Joomla.

Part 1

1. Download and run the WP converter.
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3. Browse for the WP xml file under "WordPress Backup".
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11. Go to Part 2 of this guide.

Part 2

1. Browse to the folder where you have previously saved the converted WP posts. i.e. joomla_import.sql
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Exporting Comments

This tool does not export WordPress comments. However you can use existing Joomla components i.e. JoomlaComment to import your WP comments into Joomla. JoomlaComment would need your exported WP posts to retain its original IDs, so ensure that you've checked "Preserve WP IDs" before you start exporting your posts. (Thanks Simon)

Warning: If you already have articles in Joomla that have the same IDs as some of your posts in WP, you may encounter some errors.

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