It happened again, P1 suffered serious network problem during the last weekend. The previous major outage took place last October 2009.
This time, P1 blames it on a planned network upgrade(3 months in advance) which they did not take any necessary steps to inform their precious customers. When the network went down between 6-7 March 2010, it took P1 3 days to send out this email:
Dear Mr xxx,
In the month of March, P1 has embarked upon a massive network upgrading exercise that will deliver better performance and connectivity to our rapidly increasing subscriber base. This exercise was planned over 3 months in advance with almost all eventualities and scenarios being taken into consideration to minimise any inconvenience to you.
Unfortunately, around midnight on 6 March, 2010 our technical team encountered technical difficulties during the network upgrade exercise that resulted in service being interrupted to high density areas of the P1 W1MAX network.Despite our careful planning and risk management, it is very unfortunate that what triggered the service interruption was something that is almost impossible to predict.
Immediately, upon the detection of this interruption, we deployed our rapid response technical team to restore service within our target time of 2 – 4 hours. However, due to the severity of the technical issue, service restoration took much longer than expected. As a result, you were unable to get connected to the Internet. Subsequently, service was fully restored at around 0700hrs on
7 March, 2010.To our subscribers, we sincerely apologise for the inconvenience that we have caused due to this service interruption. With immediate effect, we will waive any service charges during the period when the P1 W1MAX service was interrupted. In this case we will waive one day of service charges.
WiMAX is a very new technology and the P1 W1MAX is a relatively new network but you can be rest assured that we have amongst the best minds and talents in the world working on our network and other aspects of the business.
To ensure our network architecture and services are the best that we can provide to you, we will continuously deploy the latest network hardware and software to ensure that we are able to deliver the 4G technology promise consistently and affordably.
The service interruption has given our technical team some very valuable data to allow us to take extra precautions and reduce the risk of service interruptions if not eliminate it altogether.
We appreciate your understanding and patience and once again, we truly deeply regret the inconvenience that we have caused.
If you have further questions or require more detail on this please do not hesitate to contact the P1 Customer CareLine at 1300-800-888.
Sincerely,
Your friends at P1
Source
Dear friends at P1, if this is a planned upgrade(3 months in advance), you should inform customers. And since you didn’t, you betrayed your customers who suffered from your planned actions. On top of that, why on earth the smart people at P1 planned a network upgrade during weekend when Internet traffic is high? There is no common sense. Network upgrade should be done at night between 1am-8am during weekdays when Internet traffic is at minimum.
Michael Lai, the CEO of P1 used to say that Internet is a necessity, just like water and electricity to the home, I guess the network team in P1 does not share the same idea and mission of their CEO and the company.
Although P1 decided to waive a one day service chargers, it does not make a difference. It was a day without proper Internet service for P1 customers and this “experience” is good enough for users to terminate their subscription. I am hoping for the second time that P1 would learn something out of this. Customer experience is key to everything, how do you feel when you turn on your computer and tried accessing the Internet but then P1 is not working? You get a disappointed customer. Imagine that this could have happened to thousands of P1 customers out there.
If you are subscribed to P1, I urged you to re-consider using the service. As P1 themself says it in the email above, they are new and without experience. Maybe Malaysians should give them a year or two before seriously thinking of replacing their current broadband service with WiMAX.
