The gloves are off. Hot on the heels of unleashing their 1Gbps fiber internet services to Malaysia for RM199 a month, Time Internet posted up a message to all Malaysians thanking their current customers for their support, as well as clearing up some misconceptions about their coverage issues.
When we first leaked a screenshot of the new pricing plans yesterday, there was a significant amount of negative comments posted against Time Internet across social media channels, especially with regards to their lack of coverage. Some of these comments, went on to berate Time for their ‘preference’ of only laying infrastructure at high rise residences, to ‘save costs‘ otherwise they will end up loosing money. Some even went as far as to claim that Time does not have the expertise to handle fibre installation for landed properties.
We found the bulk of these comments to be uncalled for as we believe that Time has been doing a fantastic job in bringing Malaysia up to speed and disrupting the ISP industry over the last few years, even if its ‘only’ for 600,000 premises around the country at this point in time.
TIME has responded to this by publishing a full explanation via their facebook page addressing the issues in detail, signed off by all 1,149 of us at Time.
As seen in the above screen grab of their post, Time has made it clear that they are more then ready to roll out their high speed fiber network to landed properties. But they have not been given approval by the powers that be to plant new poles, or get access to existing poles to serve landed neighborhoods.
The post goes on to explain that they are not willing to resell “someone else’s” network either, as they believe that they need to maintain full control over the quality and speed of their 100% Fibre Broadband network that runs on their own infrastructure.
“Lets be clear: it’s not because we don’t want to. We simply cannot get approval”. – Time
If Time has the ability and the resources to plant new poles for their own networks, it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever for them to be forced to use or resell someone else’s infrastructure. It makes even less sense that with all the push towards bringing affordable high speed internet access to every corner of Malaysia, there are still unfair obstacles and hurdles being thrown to thwart fair competition among the service providers in the country.
