A week ago, the popular streaming service Netflix has decided to reduce its traffic in Malaysia by 25%. This was done to lower down the stress faced by the Internet infrastructure in our country since Internet usages have increased as majority of the population need to stay home due to the Movement Control Order (MCO).
To us, this sounds as if our infrastructure was facing quite a hit from MCO usages and we tried to verify this with a number of major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and mobile telcos. Aside from TM, TIME Internet is another company that has responded to our query which stated that while there was indeed increase of usages during the first half of MCO, it is not high enough to put tremendous stress on the country’s Internet infrastructure.
TIME further revealed that for its network, there has been approximately 30% increase in usages related to entertainment and communication as well as gaming apps and sites. That is quite an interesting figure since TIME’s major competitor, TM has also seen more than 30% increase of usages during the first half of MCO.
When asked how TIME cope with the increase of demand by its customers, the ISP stated that its network already been designed for high bandwidth usage and has no problem to coupe with the scenario. Since we have yet to hear any major downtime on TIME or TM fibre services, it generally seems that our Internet infrastructure (at least in terms of fixed broadband) is holding on well during the MCO period.
Meanwhile, please continue to stay home as much as possible as well as practice good hygiene and social distance for the time being. The fight against COVID-19 is far from over and we can only win the fight by putting in our effort together.
