UNIFI

Sungai Buloh is one of the first few lucky areas which get the UNIFI after the trial run ended in June. And I believe I was among the first few who are 'lucky' to get it installed when it is made available from July 2010. The TM contractors had been working on the underground cables for quite sometime and I was excited the first time I saw..

Anyway, mine was finally installed on the 8th July, I've asked for earlier installation but they need to wait for the underground contractor to lay the final run from the nearest point to my house. Full installation took around 6 hours but I was told, some other places that don't require underground cabling, the installation team took much less .. 3 hours or less. Since I was on 4Mbps Screamyx Combo before, I guess I should go for the VIP5 which gives me 5Mbps down/up speed. 

What works and what doesn't? Well, the speed is surely much better than the 4Mbps that I had before, the upload speed will sometime reach the max too .. at almost 5Mbps. But the router that comes with the package is a bit PITA. After a day, I suddenly felt that the speed just gone really really slow .. did a speedtest and surely, it was less than 1Mbps and stuttering .. switching off and back on the router seem to solve this problem. Searching the net and I guess I'm not the only one having problem with this D-Link DIR-615 router. I was told that probably the connection limit on the router is set too low but there is no way that we can increase this.  After few searches, found the following guide on the net which allows me to replace the DIR-615 with my old WZR-HP-G300NH (running OpenWRT). 

http://unifi.athena.my/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=49&Itemid=61

This however doesn't let me to get rid of the DIR-615 once and for all.. the IPTV requires VLAN tagging to work and my WZR-HP-G300NH doesn't support (or I don't know how to configure the port based VLAN tagging) the VLAN tagging feature. But for now, my connection to the net works just like before, no slow down .. doesn't need to reset the router every day..! I was told that TM will start charging for certain channels on IPTV starting this August .. probably I'll just go and box the DIR-615 along with the IPTV box .. they channels that they have there a bit pathetic, CBeebies, some news channels that nobody gonna watch and Fashion TVs .. who on earth are going to watch those Fashion channels.. duh.. surely, I'm not going to pay for those channels.. and I've Astro anyway.. 

For now .. I still satisfy with the speed, but hey, UNIFI still doesn't have many subscribers yet, probably when they subscriber base increases, I will surely sure beach ball spinning when browsing the net. And hopefully TM will put the cap on the download so those pirates sucking the movies from torrent will not be able to hog the bandwith all day long.