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from: Charles F. Moreira charles@oneworld.com.my
to: Jeff Ooi
date: Apr 14, 2007 5:47 AM
subject: Re: 3.3% and 75%

Jeff,

I don't like commenting on your blog because even though I'm a registered user, TypeKey has been a pain in the arse and has not allowed me to comment.

Anyway, be careful about this 3.3% and 75% penetration thing.

According to the Keng Yaik's printed speech the National B/B Plan's target is 75% HOUSEHOLD broadband penetration by 2010.

According to this comprehensive MCMC report attached which was posted to its site recently, we curently have 14.4% household broadband penetration as of Q2 2006 and 3.3% penetration by POPULATION.

The significant and more accurate measure of broadband penetration should be by household, since we don't all walk around with Streamx lines tied to us, though penetration by population would be more significant and accurate for mobile phones which are personal.

'Best effort'

On best effort, an engineer with a company providing WiMAX equipment explained the concept of "overbooking" which roughly goes that if you have a 1Gbps pipe serving your area, it's not economical for the service provider
to serve only 1,000 subscribers, each with 1Mbps accounts, since they would not earn enough from subscriptions to justify that, though each subscriber would be very happy with full 1Mbps speed.

So they have to "overbook" by supplying say 10,000 subscribers, each with 1Mbps accounts, totalling 10Gbps from that 1Gbps pipe and hope that they don't all watch YouTube or do a BitTorrent download at the same time.

In short, no ISP providing shared bandwidth service like ADSL anywhere in the world provides guaranteed bandwidth to the mass market.

Some may overbook less and some may overbook more and maybe Streamyx overbooks too much.

If we want guaranteed bandwidth, we have to then get an E1 leased line and pay the astronomical price.

I'm afraid that's something the good doctor fails to understand.

A fine example is toilets. A building office building 1,000 people does not have 1,000 toilets, since toilet usage patterns are random and they provide enough so that office workers can always find an available urinal or toilet.

However if everyone has the runs all at the same time due to eating something bad at an office party the night before then there will be toilet congestion the next day.

Keng Yaik once said his portfolio included pangsai as well. Maybe he would understand that toilet analogy.

'BTW, I wasn't cynical'

BTW. I wasn't being cynical about sending an astronaut into space to tweak or replace the satellite's transponder. Rather I felt it was a better option than inconveniencing many people on the ground by withdrawing the 3.5GHz and
leaving many customers high and dry without connections.

Instead of playing marbles, making teh tarik and spinning tops in space, that would be a more worthwhile endeavour which would show Malaysia really boleh.

I'll miss Kang Yaik after the next general erections (opps -- slipped into Japanese-English)

Cheers

Charles