aaadooi!..hanya berita

I heard on BBC World Service radio an hour ago of this very interesting story. A pigeon was used to compare with the data transfer using a broadband connection in South Africa. A 4GB memory stick was attached to the pigeon called Winston as the data carrier. The data destination was somewhere 60 miles away. Winston took two hours to finish off the job, whereas the poor Telkom ADSL only did 4% of the data.

The story gives an interesting perspective commonly known in the IT circle. Sometimes mixing old and new methods can be the best method of achieving something. A same analogy is to copy the huge amount of data into a hard disk, ask an office boy to carry it in a bus, to the remote office for offloading the data. Not only is it faster, but it is more cost effective.

But I think the issue here is that many broadband service providers are not true to what they claim to be offering. And I believe Malaysia is no exception, as I have heard many many complaints from Streamyx users of pathetic performance over their broadband lines. Worse, outages in Malaysia seem common and usually the service providers do not own up to the problem, not even a notice of any problem in their infrastructure. Such endemic problem is a reflection of a monopolistic environment in the telco industry in Malaysia.

I am floating this up just to solicit feedback and discussion from broadband users. I count myself fortunate as the home broadband here in Singapore has been pretty reliable of and high performance.