FTTH in Malaysia

FTTH in Malaysia !Nov 15, 2009 16:43

I got very lucky to be one of the beta testers for Maxis Fibre to the Home Broadband internet. It was only open to about 50 users in Bangsar Baru. Lucky Me! They had some sort of an interview for each of the beta testers, but apparently it wasn't too stringent and it was a rather good mix of power users, average users and "hardly any use" users.

This bump in speed is definitely a big one for me, as I was previously on the cheapest broadband package all this time. 512kbps Streamyx Package.

Here's Maxis Fibre To The Home speed:

Kuala Lumpur Server test on top and Seri Kembangan Server test below

Considering its a fiber optic connection, its not super duper blazing fast, but it is very much more than adequate for the home user. OMG. you tube is where you see the biggest difference. It streams flawlessly on HD full screen. Torrenting is up to 600kbps!+++ Installation of the FTTH was seriously very labour intensive. These guys brought a snorkel to pull the cable to my home

And that was just the first team. They had to pull a cable from the main line to my home. These main cables were apparently gas filled. Once the cable was up, they filled it with gas, and that would be the conduit. The cable from the junction box to my home would be the fibre optic cable. The 2nd team was resposible for laying the cable from the junction box of the mainline into my home. They installed the Optical Cable junction in my hall

Then the 3rd team came in to fuse the fibre optic cable to a thinner manageble yellow wire to the modem. They really have to sort out the part about installation, as it is really very labour intensive to install just 1 modem. The engineers used a strange machine for connecting the two cables. Very geeky indeed

After verifying a good connection, with yet another device, they plugged it into the optic fibre cable modem.

No setup was necessary on the computer. Just plugged to the ethernet jack behind the modem, and another one to my computer. Simple as that.The home network hasn't been connected to the optical modem as of yet but i'll do that later. (err.. my workstation is littered with networking stuff. Have to clean it up.. later...) The beta testing is supposed to go on for the next three months before Maxis Offers FTTH to the public. Right now, the testing phase only involves a small area, Bangsar Baru, in Kuala Lumpur.

More to come, Maxis will be providing an IP phone for testing calls. Astro and Maxis are going to do a tie-up to provide HDTV thru the optical modem. Finally, Justification to buy a HDTV! As of now, with the light load of being in a testing phase, the speed is a "Happy fast". Just hopes it stays that way when the server gets loaded. I'm off to download stuff at my "happy fast" speed !!