Click for larger image

While speed is everything when you’re surfing internet superhighway on the world wide web, the same can’t be said when you’re cruising down a highway of the asphalt kind. In the real world, speed is not everything and sometimes, fast is too fast. Case in point.

Drive safe people.

[via]

We have information confirming that P1 is currently experiencing a nationwide service interruption affecting a large number of subscribers possibly in the tens of thousands.

We first picked-up reports on the disruption at 1900hrs and at time of writing P1 via its customer service account, @P1Cares, says that its engineers are working on the issue. The account didn’t indicate on when it expects the P1 service to be fully restored.

A quick check on Twitter and Facebook reveals that the service interruption extends to multiple states. We attempted to call the P1 Customer Careline at 1-300-800-888 for more information but the line is engaged.

If you are P1 subscriber, we would like to hear from you. Let us know if you are able to connect to the internet on your P1 connection.

Recently you probably have seen P1 4G doing tie in ads with the latest installment of Fast and Furious movie. The movie sponsorship, if it considered as one seems to portray P1 as a speed demon broadband in conjunction with its Stronger, Wider and Faster motto. From the surface, it looks as if P1 is hard selling the movie more than its own broadband service which is actually having some noteworthy offers.

For the past several months, P1 has been doing its 50% off promo on its broadband service for 2 months on both fixed home broadband and portable USB broadband plans. Now they have thrown in more discounts for new subscriptions.

Home Broadband

For fixed home usage, they are offering subscription of only RM49 for 3 months on both Pro (4.8Mbps) and Plus (1.2Mbps) broadband plans. This gives substantial savings for Pro users of RM270 from monthly subscription fees alone. The promo 3 months subscription fee does not apply on its lowest Lite (400kbps) plan.

Portable Broadband

For portable plans, they offer promo rates with RM10-30 reduction depending on plans for 6 months. Casual W1GGY (600kbps) is offered at RM49 (RM10 savings), W1GGY (1.5Mbps) at RM69 (RM20 savings) while Super W1GGY (No limit) at RM99 (RM30 savings) which gives a total savings of RM60, RM120 and RM180 off the total monthly subscription respectively.

If you’re interested, you can head to their home broadband page here or W1GGY page here. New subscribers can stand a chance to win some holiday trips too.

It baffles us to why P1 would overshadow its plans and services for a movie, considering they have a pretty good offer with substantial savings at the moment. Even from the ads and banners, we felt that P1 is underselling its services which should be a main focus instead. Other telcos do have tie ups with artists and movies but they were done without overshadowing its core services. Anyway, perhaps P1 has its own reasons and they should know better.

P1 has started the new year with a revamp of its fixed broadband packages for home and business users. Previously they had 3 home and 2 business plans with speed offerings between 400kbps to 2.4Mbps but now they have bumped their highest Pro plan with 4.8Mbps download speed.

To make it simple, P1 no longer offer separate plans for business or home users so there’s only 3 plans to choose from right now – Lite with 400kbps, Plus with 1.2Mbps and Pro with 4.8Mbps. This also means that they have stopped offering unlimited plans which was previously exclusively for business users.

The Lite and Plus plan remains unchanged as it maintains the same speed, quota and monthly subscription. However with the new rates, existing Plus users are clearly enticed to get 4X the download speed with 10GB additional quota for a mere RM40. That’s only RM4/GB for additional quota for those who exceed their typical 20GB quota for Home Plus plan.

Earlier on, P1′s Pro plan was originally priced at RM199/month for 2.4Mbps download speeds at 40GB quota a month. Probably knowing that this is too much for a wireless broadband service, they later reduced the subscription fee to RM139/month while reducing the quota to 30GB a month.

With the latest revision, Pro users get to enjoy much higher download speeds but like any other wireless services, it all depends on the network congestion of your area. We hope that P1 is ready to deliver 4.8Mbps download speeds to avoid situation of over-promising like its P1 W1GGY some time ago.

The offer is also made sweeter as P1 is giving all plans additional 50% off for the 2nd and 3rd month subscription, which is basically 1 month worth of savings. For more information, head to P1′s broadband promo page.

P1 has done a revamp on its WiGGY packages featuring the new UH Shuttle modem. Last week the UH Shuttle modem was offered for its Super Broadband package but now it is also offered on its own.

NEW

In the new revamp, the UH Shuttle Modem is bundled together with the RM89 and RM129 subscription plans while the lower RM59 plan gets the old WiGGY. To sweeten the deal, they are also giving 50% off for 2 months subscriptions which is only valid for RM89 and RM129 subscription.

OLD

Compared to the old WiGGY Plans, the new offering has less data quota than before while the speed is pretty much the same. The RM59 plan is 2GB less while higher 2 plans with the new UH Modem are getting 5GB less monthly. If you’re an existing WiGGY customer, it is better to stick to your current plan.

More details of the new WiGGY packages here.

P1 has added a new modem into their Super Broadband Package. The UH Shuttle modem is a new add-on option for RM30/month which they claims to be more powerful than the old WiGGY.

Looking at the design, it looks more bulky than the old one making it more cumbersome to use. For extra RM10 over the older WiGGY, we simply can’t see the benefit of paying more. P1′s coverage out of home isn’t that great and we are not convinced if this new modem would solve coverage and mobility issues that we faced previously.

As mentioned before, why can’t they offer outright purchase of the modem instead of charging customers monthly to utilise existing bandwidth? Check out the full details of the add-on package at P1′s site.

You can read up more technical info on the new modem here.

P1 now known as P1 4G has officially reveal its Super Broadband Package. This comes right after ITU announced the “real” 4G standards which doesn’t exist at the moment. So what’s so super about this new broadband package? Do you get more data? More speed? Extra coverage? All that super hero action is sadly nothing to shout out. There isn’t any MiFi revealed as teased by its CEO recently.

This super broadband package is just a mere add on supplement portable plan on top of existing P1 plans for home. You still get the same RM49/month for the home entry package and the same 5GB a month. What’s new is that you can add additional RM20 to any of your home plan to get an extra WiGGY or an account for your Wimax Inside laptop or netbook. However you don’t get additional bandwidth as it is shared with your existing home plan. So what you’re paying monthly is just rental for the modem which is not worth it if you ask us. What’s worse is those on WiMAX Inside devices are also required to pay RM20/month despite no need for a additional modem.

If P1 wanted to do a real SUPER offer, they should given more bandwidth and more speed as per claim of being stronger and faster. New products and services please! We’re seeing the same old products over and over again.

If this is all P1 has to counter YTL’s launch next month, we must say it is really pathetic. Speaking of Wider, whatever happen to their expansion plan into East Malaysia this year? It seems that they have slowed down in terms of coverage roll out lately.

More details on P1 Super Broadband Package here.

P1 claims that its network is now “stronger, wider and faster” and the operator has developed a new advertising campaign to shout this from the proverbial rooftop.

In conjunction with new advertising campaign the WiMAX operator has also introduced a new Super Broadband package with Super Quota allowing customers to share monthly data cap across two devices. This means if you’re currently signed on to P1′s home plan with a data cap of 10GB per month, you can use that data cap with P1′s portable WiMAX dongle as well.

Effectively you have one plan with one data cap but two devices that you can use it on. Sounds interesting but this Super Broadband plan comes with an additional charge of RM20 per month with no additional data added on. That means you’re paying RM20 just for the option to use the data cap across devices, which is terrible marketing if you ask us. Who’d want to pay an additional RM20 per month just so you can use your data cap on another device.

We don’t mind a one time fee, or if P1 still insists on a monthly fee for the option, then add on another 5GB while you’re at it. Sorry P1, you can add all the super you want in front of everything but to us, this is a nonsense plan.

At the same time P1 has also announce that it doesn’t like to be called P1 W1MAX and wants to be referred to as P1 4G. P1 CEO Michael Lai was quoted saying in a press release made available to use that “WiMAX is a 4G technology and we are the leading player in the 4G broadband space. We will always provide our users with the best connectivity using the best 4G technology available but that technology may not always be WiMAX”

This is shocking considering he has always been a strong supporter of WiMAX and has been known to say “we (P1) live and die with WiMAX“.

In any case, as users of the P1 service we haven’t felt any noticeable improvements in terms of network performance and stability. In fact, it has been the other way around with the occurrence of isolated outages being more frequent than ever before. Let’s not even start with the indifferent customer service attitude.

So it makes you wonder whether this “stronger, wider, faster” thing that P1 is talking about is all smoke and mirrors.

What do you think? If you’re a P1 subscriber, how has the service been of late.

[picture credit]

Ok before all the P1 haters out there take out their pitchforks, we’re making it clear, we have no conclusive evidence but based on our own use of the service and from feedback we’ve been getting from other P1 users, the YouTube streaming has been choppy of late.

Everyone knows that with P1, when it’s good, its really good but when it’s crap, you can’t do jack online. But we can’t help but notice that we’re getting consistently slow streaming on YouTube when on the P1 network. It’s been happening almost all the time in the past couple of weeks.

We noticed that we had no problems whatsoever surfing almost every other sites and even downloading torrents is as smooth as butter. So is P1 throttling down YouTube streaming? It doesn’t make sense for them to, if they want to curb data hoggers and network abusers, then they should go straight for the throat and clamp down on torrent downloading.

But so far, it has been the other way around, we’ve been getting good download speeds but very bad streaming on YouTube. Anyone else going through the same thing? Comment us.

P1 has introduced a new modem, the DX-230 which features 802.11b/g/n WiFi, 2x LAN ports and 2x phone ports. Design wise it looks more aesthetically pleasing as their current DV-230 has a separate WiFi module sticking out from the back.

We also noticed that the older DS-300 has been dropped from the website and the DV-230 is offered for its lower 400kbps package. With the DS-300 phased out, WiFi sharing is now standard on all P1′s desktop offering.

Existing users can purchase the new modem at RM399 at P1 P@ddock and P1tstop outlets.

Apart from the new modem, there’s also a revision of WiMAX pricing.

For its 2.4Mbps Home Pro plan, P1 is now offering it at RM139/month with 30GB data allowance. Previously this was priced at RM199/month with 40GB. This seems to be reduced to entice existing 1.2Mbps users to add RM40 for double the speed and 50% extra data allowance which isn’t too bad. The only concern is whether your area can support up 2.4Mbps as there are some who struggled to reach its max potential speed.

If we calculate the cost per GB, the 1.2Mbps with 20GB/month at RM99 will cost you RM4.95/GB while the 2.4Mbps with 30GB/month at RM139, costs RM4.64/GB. So it costs slightly less per GB and you get to enjoy potentially double the speed of the 1.2Mbps package. Worth considering if 20GB is not sufficient for your monthly usage.

There’s also a promotion for its 1.2Mbps Home Plus plan where P1 waived its Registration and Activation Fee. On top of that, they slashed half for 2nd and 3rd month bill which translate a total of RM260 off. The rest of the plans get only RM100 off for Registration Fee.

More details at P1 website.