I’m the unofficial reporter for chess tournaments in Malaysia. Right now I’m at a major chess tournament between ASEAN youth chess teams. It kills me when I cannot blog about it because of the lack of Internet connection.

I am currently staying at the Concorde Hotel, Shah Alam to provide coverage for the event via the official tournament website. The first day I used the hotel’s internet connection which costs RM 57 for 24 hours. This is very expensive as the online time starts when you first connect and ends exactly 24 hours later regardless of whether you used the internet connection in between or not.

For the second day I had to go to Starbucks across the hotel to update the chess results.

Luckily today, a friend loaned me his Maxis USB modem to use.


Right now I’m in my hotel room blogging about this.


Small isn’t it. I like the compact size and the idea of getting online anywhere. So far, I’ve only used it at the 2nd floor and now in the 6th floor of the hotel. There are feedback that Maxis users have increased dramatically and that the overall speed is starting to slow down. One of my friends initially reported fantastic speeds when Maxis first started with this wireless program but later complained that his speeds was sometimes worse than dial up.

I checked out Speedtest.net to see how fast the connection was. The plan my friend subscribed to is the RM138 per month with a theoretical speed of 3.6 Mbps.

Download speed: 380 Kb/s
Upload speed: 161 kb/s

Not the promised 3.6 Mbps but I’m satisfied as this is more than adequate for most of my online activities. I wish the price for Maxis Broadband was lower though. RM100 perhaps? Or perhaps I should look at the bigger and not so sexy bulky modem option at slower speeds but cheaper RM 68 per month.

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