Celebrate a Stronger, Wider and Faster New Year with P1 4G. 50% Off Your 2nd & 3rd Bill and a FREE 2X SPEED UPGRADE For Pro. Yup that’s what the new promotional banner says. There’s nothing new about the first part with the 50% off the 2nd and 3rd bill but the 2X speed upgrade – now that’s something worth looking into. P1 promises an upgrade to 4.8Mbps from 2.4Mbps for their Pro plan. So what about the Office Premium Package? What Office package? There no longer is an Office package!
P1 4G (formerly known as P1 W1MAX) decided to start off 2011 by streamlining their packages. Instead of 5 different packages (3 for home, 2 for business) there will now be only 3 which cater for both home and business users.
The P1 Pro Package now comes with a limit of 30GB but the price has been slashed from RM199 to RM139. That’s terrific news! Coupled with the extra bandwidth that’s like hitting the jackpot! Home users rejoice!
Too bad we can’t celebrate for the business users. The absence of a business package means that the maximum subscription is P1 Pro at 30GB. Anything more than 30GB of usage and your line will be throttled. You and I know how bad throttling can be. You will be placed on the low priority list where multiple users fight for bandwidth. That places you on the same level with those who purchase the P1 Lite and P1 Plus subscribers. Plus we can’t be sure if there is a priority list for that.
Here’s an excerpt from Wikipedia on bandwidth throttling.
When a server using bandwidth throttling reaches the specified limit, it will offload new requests and not respond to them. Sometimes they may be added to a queue to be processed once the bandwidth use reaches an acceptable level, but at peak times the request rate can even exceed the capacities of such queues and requests have to be thrown away.
There could be various reasons why P1 is cutting off the unlimited business package.
- There were too few subscribers for the business package in 2010
- There were too many business package users abusing the unlimited usage
- To meet the current demand but maintain the current hardware capacity
Whatever the reason, I am quite sure that P1 has a good one to back up their decision. I just hope they are doing the right thing to compete with their biggest competition – YES 4G by YTL Group!
