I'm sure this picture makes you want to live in South Korea... But what I'm saying is not only do Malaysia's internet bears the lowest speed it could possibly get... but the number of BLOCKED websites are also a menace... Don't get me started on "QUOTA".
It's annoying really to have limited choices. Yeah thank God for Broadbands you can carry your modem anywhere without having to look for pugs and sockets and cables. Also, thank you Starbucks for the free wi-fi. And thank you to fiber-based internet for rich people. (Looking bad at poor old dial-up net).
What bothers me the most is that the government wants everything to be done "ONLINE". From banking to shopping to facebooking to e-Learning and so on and so on... And this makes people who can't have easy access to internet a bit "kampung". And people that do have access, charged to their death for every volume of internet they use.
QUOTA is RIDICULOUS. It was back in 2008 (I think, too lazy for research) when our PM decided to make everyone pay for each byte of internet. I mean, what happened to charging by good old internet speed?! This means you are limited to 5GB of internet per month for RM98.00 and should you want more, you gotta "PURCHASE" the data volume. While people who uses internet only for boring e-mailings and stuff don't give a f- what they are being limited to, people like us who uses internet for EVERYTHING else, suffer.
Okay if that's not enough, how about BLOCKING some websites? Especially when they see certain websites has too many hits. You can block all the porn that you want, but it only leads to people Torrenting (is that even a word?) them and spreading em around in Hard drives. Some even selling em for money coz well, its marketable due to those restrictions. So yeah, kinda pointless. And okay fine, religious.. political debates are the reason for that and I don't have much against it but blocking ACCESS TO FILE SHARING?! Really?! You are that desperate to keep your people's minds inside a cage??? "Because we can't afford to allow piracy." Would be your excuse. Dude, do you see any Hollywood actors and stars and producers living under bridges? No. They live in mansions in Beverly Hills because they don't freaking care who downloads their movies or music from Torrent.com.
That leads to a smaller scope. Government institutions. I love my job, yeah. And I love the idea they planted in our head that everything has to be "e". From e-mails to e-FRPs to e-Learning and e-Filing... the list goes on. And I love how those "e"'s make my life easier. And they also gave us courses to "be more creative" in teaching, make videos and animations for your students. I love how I am allowed to be creative and hell yeah I am excited about it...
What I am NOT excited is when I log on my computer using my OFFICE net and wanting to log on YOUTUBE to download motivational videos for my students, this popped up.
Okay so they blocked YOUTUBE. I'll download it using my sad 5GB limited broadband I pay for with my sad salary. I'll just get some music for my video background -
REALLY? MP3 Skull - BLOCKED. 4Shared - BLOCKED. etc etc...
Ok so bye bye videomaking. I decided to do some trolling with the internet. So they found out about the "https" thing and also blocked FACEBOOK. There goes social life. I typed the word "GAME" in google and LOLed at the fact that any website with the word "GAME" is blocked. So is "ENTERTAINMENT", "HOLLYWOOD" and a few malay words I can't remember. So basically all I have to live at work is plain empty google.com having no idea what to search for.
I don't know for how long we are going to live with not only the SLOWEST internet in the world, but also the most EXPENSIVE and most LIMITED access to anything. While people around the world are enjoying World of Warcraft without "lags" here we are working in front of a government desk trying to pay for our personal internet to use for official work only to receive SMSs from phone companies saying "You have reached your quota limit. Please give us money to continue surfing".
