“Malaysia’s Convergence Champion”, Telekom Malaysia has quietly upgraded its Unifi Advance 30Mbps package, now with a 10Mbps upload speed from 5Mbps previously.
The Unifi Advance 50Mbps fiber plan has also been upgraded, now with a 20Mbps upload speed from 10Mbps previously.
It appears that all current Unifi Advance fiber customers are now enjoying the faster upload speed.
Both TM Unifi Advance plans were unveiled in June-July 2015. The Unifi Advance 30Mbps is currently at a promotional price of RM189.74/month while the Unifi Advance 50Mbps is priced at RM242.74/month, including GST. All packages come with a 2 years contract.
Comment
I am glad that TM listened to its customers and upgraded the Unifi Advance 30Mbps upload speed from 5Mbps to 10Mbps, despite it took around 7-months.
TM previously stated that from the usage statistics of its current UniFi customer including from VIP 10Mbps and VIP 20Mbps customers, 90% of total users only use less than 5Mbps upload speed. Perhaps TM finally realised that Malaysians are becoming more active on the Internet- uploading files, photos, videos.
While this is a good move for consumers, there are still other important areas where TM should improve itself.
First, TM should give customers the option whether they want HyppTV. The UniFi Advance plans still comes bundled with HyppTV. Without these add on, TM’s broadband services could possibly be priced cheaper.
Second, TM’s Unifi voice call rate is charged at 20sen/min for calls to land lines and mobile phones. Local calls to TM fixed line used to free on the old TM VIP Unifi packages while mobile operators like U Mobile are charging 5sen/30sec (10sen/min) to all network. Why can’t TM reduce its voice call rate?
Third, the Service Level Agreement (SLA) of the Unifi Advance service are still unclear. Unifi Advance is based on asymmetrical speeds where download speed is faster than upload speed. One of the disadvantages of Asymmetrical speeds- the download speed could affect the rate of upload speed, and vice-versa. If someone in your home is downloading a huge file (or torrenting/P2P), this process could use all the available bandwidth. As a result, you could notice extremely slow Internet service especially when you try to upload a file.
There have been complaints from users who upgraded from the old VIP Unifi (dedicated upload/download speeds) to the new Unifi Advance plan who experienced slower broadband speed.
TM doesn’t mention what kind of minimum speeds users could expect on Unifi Advance at all times.
Last but not least, there’s no mention on the quota of Unifi Advance service. TM says it offers “Unlimited Experience” which could mean anything but doesn’t say unlimited usage anywhere in the Terms & Conditions. TM agents/ dealers are distributing flyers that says Unlimited usage on Unifi Advance however consumers are at a disadvantage here because TM could at anytime impose a quota limit and this won’t void the 2-years contract.
Consumers who want alternative could take up TIME’s 100Mbps fibre broadband plan at RM179/month for the 1st 100GB data. Further usage will limit browsing speed to 10Mbps which TIME clearly says it is unlimited usage. Unfortunately, TIME’s coverage is very limited at the moment. Celcom is expected to launch its fiber service sometime this year. Till then, most of us are stuck with Unifi.
P.s: With the upload speed upgrade, I guess, there’s now only 4 reason why I won’t upgrade to TM’s Unifi Advance 30Mbps.
Disclaimer: This is an opinion based article and it is the personal view of the writer. It does not necessarily represent the view of MalaysianWireless.
