Maxis says there’s no management of P2P traffic on their Home Broadband

We recently received a tip that Maxis will throttle peer-to-peer traffic on their Home Broadband Plans between 8PM to 2AM daily. To confirm this, we contacted Maxis and we’re told that this wasn’t the case as all customers should be able to enjoy full speeds throughout the day.

To clarify on the situation, Maxis has provided us with the following statement:

There has been an error during a scheduled update of information on our website.

Specifically this refers to P2P data traffic policy for MaxisONE Home Broadband users. Currently there is no management of P2P traffic of any kind (or internet data traffic types of any kind, for that matter).

The only consideration for any data management, limited to specific users who abuse data volume quotas, only apply to fair usage policy (FUP) violations.

Customers are free to enjoy unlimited fast internet throughout the day.

This means you should be able to use your broadband for peer-to-peer applications without any intentional restrictions as long as you do not abuse your plan’s quota. The biggest question is, how much data can you use for P2P? According to their FAQ, there are no quota limits in place for all of their MaxisONE Home Broadband.

When we seek further clarification we are told that users would not be affected as long as they don’t abuse their broadband plan for extremely high downloads, especially for illegal purposes. Basically, anything that involves infringing copyright and intellectual property. If an abnormal usage is detected, it will be investigated first on a case to case basis. This is pretty much the same policy as any other telcos in Malaysia.

It was interesting to note that this P2P throttling between 8PM to 2AM on Maxis isn’t new. We’ve mentioned this in the previous home broadband revamp on November 2016 and it appears to be part of Maxis’ Fair Usage Policy implementation as early as 2013.

In my opinion, having to throttle P2P traffic during those peak hours is probably a good thing for their network. This would help to reduce network congestion when most people are at home catching up on Netflix and YouTube videos. Let’s not kid ourselves, torrenting takes a lot of bandwidth. And to encourage people to do so during off-peak hours would ensure better internet is available for most users when they needed it the most.

If you’re a Maxis Broadband customer, how’s your experience so far when it comes to P2P? Let us know in the comments below.

Thanks Josh HD for the tip.