Sean's blog

TM Streamyx and telephone down Port Dickson area 24th February 2011

Sometime around 3pm the Internet connection died. The phone is also dead (no dialtone). There’s no sign of my friendly local technicians at the local switchbox, so perhaps it’s not just this area. Then again, perhaps nobody knows. I tried to fill in a “Contact Us” form at www.tm.com.my but the submit button didn’t work. I’m installing VirtualBox at this moment so I can install an old copy of Windows XP and try to use their website that way. Perhaps I’d be better off with cURL and a hand-crafted POST. Then again, it’s well past fucking time I just sold this house and went to live somewhere with working Internet.

I can hear Jess downstairs giving it “Adoi ma” after the “mm kthxbai” on her handphone: seems like she’s not having much better luck. Everybody who once visited our house as a TM technician seems to have a new job elsewhere now. There’s no way we’re phoning the 1300 88 9515 line – it has been such an utter and miserable waste of time on every occasion we’ve phoned it in the past, and we’ve had to hold on through criminally spammy advertising for so long each time that we have built up considerable antipathy towards TM’s ‘customer support line’. We would need personal visits, to our door, at least one hour before a fault occurred, with chocolates and flowers on at least three occasions before we would consider wasting our lives away on 1300 88 9515 again.

Hmmm… my DiGi adapter is also not being very reliable. Is the network problem infectious?

Jess has got through to a technician from her massive list who reports that the problem is that the telephone network is “down”, but is working on it and expects it to be back tonight.

Hmmm… no joy connecting to DiGi mobile internet for ten minutes now. Welcome to Malaysia!

DiGi’s back, I’d better get this published.

Update: Phone and Streamyx back around 17:30.

Update 5th March 2011: Received an email from TM in response to the support form I filled in at tm.com.my to tell me that the problem has been fixed. They refer to “our telephone conversation on 24th February 2011 (Time: 1:10 PM)”, which was before the problem occurred. I can only imagine it’s a copy-and-pasted email reply.

Interestingly, I see that it costs different amounts of money to call TM’s support line from different mobile networks, with Celcom being the cheapest at a fixed RM1, Maxis next with a fixed RM2 and DiGi potentially the most expensive quoted at RM0.60 per minute. A typical wait (in my experience) of calling TM support line during an outage would be five to ten minutes. I wonder who determines the charge – is it TM, or the mobile network?

They also mention that it’s free to call TM support from a fixed line to report that the fixed line network is down. I guess that’s incontrovertibly true.