You don’t see a tech site talk about their ISP everyday, is it? Well, being a techie for more than a while, I care a ton lot about what my ISP offers. I’ve had the chance to use both of Malaysia’s major Fiber Internet ISPs, TM and TIME. Both ISPs offer Fiber Internet connections for homes and businesses and are often debated over another.
Let me make this clear. I am in to way in contact with either of the ISPs or affiliated with them in any way. Everything I mention in this verdict are my own opinions and will remain that way.
Back in 2013, TM was the only option for users willing to sign up for a fiber internet connection. Not only was it fast, but back then 20Mbps was the holy grail of mankind if you wanted a fast fiber connection in Malaysia. TIME, another ISP in the region had been wandering around for a while. They had been offering way faster fiber connection speeds, but severely lacked coverage in the region. At the time, I opted to sign up for a 10Mbps connection with TM. Soon after that, TM introduced a free upgrade plan to its users by upgrading 10Mbps users to 30Mbps and upgrading 20Mbps users to 50Mbps in 2015. By the time they introduced these free upgrades, they forced users to extend their 24-month existing contract for another 24 months.
By this time, I found TM to be a good ISP and had barely had much of an issue with them. Sure, there were times when my TM connection felt a bit slow, but being a techie, I often found ways around them.
Fast-forward another 24 months, it was time to upgrade. Everyone was talking about TIME. They’re offering blew my mind at first sight. They were offering a 10x speed boost for price I was paying to TM. As soon as my contact ended, I hooked up with them and signed up for their 300Mbps connection. The problem TIME has always had, had to be the fact they had really limited coverage, but since they had finally made their coverage into our area, I had to sign up.
Once I was hooked up, I was feeling more than enthusiastic about them. I had finally witnessed the power of 300Mbps. Download speeds were through the roof and were more than enough for me. Sure, 500Mbps is also an option that TIME offers, but realistically speaking, 300Mbps is more than enough for me and my small wallet.
Since I am really wary of the issues with Wi-Fi, I’ve always made sure that I am connected to the internet with an ethernet cable. Sure, Wi-Fi is improving, but its far from satisfactory for gamers. With the equipment TIME had installed, I found and noticed that it had issues with Wi-Fi congestion. Since the router supported both major bands 2.4GHz and 5GHz, I had disabled 2.4GHz to improve my Wi-Fi connection.
After I had TIME installed at my place, I finally jumped into a competitive CSGO match, and to my surprise the pings and connection compared to TM were unrivaled. With TIME, I literally had 6ms ping on a Singaporean server. That too, without any losses and chokes. Pings do vary from time to time though, but not much. For CSGO players playing on Singaporean servers, expect 5-12ms ping depending on the time of the day. Meanwhile, with TM, I remember playing with pings ranging from 30ms to 50ms depending on the time of the day. This is a massive reduction in latency and very welcome. The same rule follows over to our Teamspeak servers too. Impressive indeed.
So, you might wonder 30-50ms on TM? That’s not bad. And yes, you’re right, not bad. However, the massive reduction can be noticed when connecting to other servers too. Such as DXB, which basically means Dubai. Here, my connection ranges between 78-90ms. While the TM connection ran between 110-140ms, which is basically unplayable.
Download speeds are also very consistent.Downloading games from Steam or downloading my backups from Google Drives resulted in a pretty hassle-free experience overall. I’ve had 35-37MB/s consistently during my usage time with TIME which impressive as well.
The consistency of the network has put a ton of confidence into me and considering that I am yet to face any downtime with TIME.
Considering my experience, I am aware that there are a ton of people complaining on both sides of the coin, whether that’s TM users or that’s TIME users. But this was my experience with TIME throughout my full year of using it. I’ll personally try to publish a few fixes for users using TIME if they’re having issues. But for now, I’m more than happy to stick with TIME.
