As you know, we have our development center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and last week we got to experience one of the downsides of being stationed out here. While most of the infrastructure is world class, one of the areas where Malaysia is really falling behind is having a fast and reliable Internet connection.
In fact, things got so bad that the Internet in our office went down for 10 of 14 days! Ouch! That was painful. Our office building has guaranteed power so the electricity will never go down but when it comes to the Internet, no guarantees exist. So, all of us s forced to relocate to my apartment. We took Mr. Smith (our development server) with us and just worked from home. It definitely created a comfy and cozy environment. Here is a picture of us working out of my living room.
By now we are back in the office and working on some exciting improvements. We are trying to create a whole new way to blink sites that should be far faster and offer a far better user experience.... and that is just one of many things we will be launching soon.
Hear, hear... Same here man... Two years ago, I decided to attend an MSC-status instution to do my MSc in Technopreneurship. Boy, I was in in for a surprise... Turns out the internet at this leading management school in Malaysia (and did I mentioned MSC?) had Internet connection much slower than my 50Kbps or less mobile GPRS per person!
Although I initially planned to spend more time at this high-tech school, I had to make weekly trips back to Penang where I can get 200Kbps GPRS or Wifi at Starbucks/Segafredo or some kedai mamak (Indian restaurants) near my house -- I also stole my neighbor's wifi at my apartment, when some of them no-security APs are up anyway, just not 24x7.
Last year, the school decided to upgrade to a bigger pipe, and the leading broadband provider in the country made huge press releases in newspapers, TV etc. But turns out, the total speed provided to the entire campus of 25,000 inhabitants (active users made of students and members of academia) was only capped at around 10Mbps which was lower than the speed I got from my single college dorm room in the USA, some 15 years ago. And they've installed Wifi terminals everywhere to provide this super bandwidth. Now, we only get 20-50Kbps per person during peak hours. If you're willing to work past midnight, you're lucky though, as you can get as much as 10Mbps all for yourself! (The campus does not condone its students to study/work at night -- most if not all residential colleges in this campus observe lightouts by midnight, I think).
Today, I'm forced to work at home, because I get better Internet access here in this small village than in an MSC-status institution or in some busy city office. (One of the reason I closed my RM700/mth officespace was because there was no provider could bring broadband to this lot next to Penang Development Corporation headquarters!) -- This was two years ago, today, I think that are has Streamyx.