UPDATE: Existing TIME customers are automatically upgraded to faster speeds without any changes to their contract. 100Mbps gets 500Mbps while 300Mbps and 500Mbps customers will get upgraded to 1Gbps.
There’s never been a more exciting time for fibre broadband in Malaysia. Two months ago, TM had announced their Unifi Turbo upgrade plans with speeds of up to 800Mbps, while Maxis and Celcom had also slashed prices for their fibre home broadband offering.
Now it appears that TIME has finally responded to TM by offering speed upgrades of their own. You can get a 1Gbps Fibre Broadband plan for less than RM300/month.
Subscribers on the 100Mbps plan have claimed to have gotten 500Mbps while those on 300Mbps are reported to be bumped up to 800Mbps.
Meanwhile, those on TIME’s current highest 500Mbps plan are apparently getting double the speed at 1Gbps.
Here’s how much TIME customers are paying:
100Mbps TIME (RM149/month) -> 500Mbps
300Mbps TIME (RM189/month) -> 800Mbps
500Mbps TIME (RM299/month) -> 1Gbps
Below is Unifi’s Turbo upgrade offering as a comparison:
10Mbps Unifi (RM129/month) -> 100Mbps
30Mbps Unifi (RM179/month) -> 300Mbps
50Mbps Unifi (RM249/month) -> 500Mbps
100Mbps Unifi (RM329/month) -> 800Mbps
At the time of posting, TIME have yet to make any announcement on the upgrade and their website is still showing their current plans without the speed upgrade. Perhaps TIME’s approach is to upgrade all of its existing customers first before making the new faster plans available for new subscribers.
The upgrade exercise should be seamless as TIME runs on a 100% fibre optic network. Meanwhile, some TM Unifi customers are capped at 30Mbps as it uses copper-based VDSL instead of fibre for certain high-rise buildings.
With this new speed upgrade, TIME will have the most affordable 500Mbps broadband plan in the country at only RM149/month. That’s 5X faster than the the 100Mbps plans that are currently offered by Maxis and Unifi at RM129/month.
While having faster speed at lower price is great, the biggest issue is always coverage. TIME Fibre Broadband’s availability is often concentrated at high-density condominiums and apartments, and they are not as widely available as Unifi and Maxis. When TIME congratulated Unifi for their speed upgrades, they did acknowledged that they need to stay committed to investing in fibre and expanding coverage whenever they can.
We hope TIME could expand its fibre broadband network to cover more households especially those that are still connected to Streamyx. There are more than 1 million customers on Streamyx and only 340,000 of them are within Unifi’s Fibre Broadband coverage. That’s about 700,000 potential new customers that TIME could tap into if they are serious about bringing more Malaysians up to speed.
If you’re on TIME Home Broadband, have you gotten your speed upgrade yet? Let us know in the comments below.
UPDATE: TIME has introduced its revised broadband plans with speeds of up to 1Gbps. Existing 100Mbps customers will be upgraded to 500Mbps, while 300Mbps and 500Mbps customers will be getting 1Gbps for free. There’s no contract extension and the new rate will be reflected in their bill starting 15 October 2018.
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