Students lament cheaper plans with crawling speeds

Glacial pace: A service engineer said it took him an entire night to download an engineering programme. — FAIHAN GHANI/The Star

PETALING JAYA: Students who depend on cheaper mobile data plans say slow and unstable Internet access often hampers their studies.

Affordable mobile plans usually have capped data speeds of three to six megabits per second (Mbps).

Universiti Malaysia Perlis student Kheerthitha Nair, 24, said she hopes telcos would increase the minimum average download speed for lower-end data packages.

“As a user with a cheaper package, I always face difficulty downloading notes given by my lecturers – even joining videoconference calls is a hassle,” she lamented.

She suggested telcos introduce a special package for students, specifically for downloading and uploading lecture notes and assignments.

Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris student Harpreet Kaur, 24, said coverage varies according to the location.

“Sometimes, I will have a signal and other times, none at all,” she said.

She said her hostel is located near a forest, and this could be the main problem in getting smoother Internet access.

“Telcos must consider upgrading to a higher-speed data plan for the cheaper packages or creating new packages to suit users’ needs,” she added.

Kelantan Matriculation College graduate Anis Ibrahim, 19, said she often has to use mobile data as the college WiFi is poor.

“I hotspot my laptop for research to complete my assignments. Unfortunately, there are many times when the page I load lags,” she said.

Some telcos have better coverage in Kelantan, she said, adding that she turns to her schoolmates for help if her mobile data is unstable.

“I have no network issues back in my hometown in Ipoh, and I hope that the telco I subscribe to can provide better coverage in other areas too,” she said.

Service engineer Tan Guan Kit, 23, said his mobile data on his current plan is slow when he travels to Kuala Terengganu for work.

“The data is only stable on one device and when I hotspot to my laptop, the network becomes much slower,” he said.

On his phone, Tan said he has no issues with normal Internet surfing or social media scrolling.

“The plan offers 6Mbps, and the best it can support is 1080p video on one device. Once I tried to download a heavy engineering programme and it took an entire night to complete downloading,” he said.

Meanwhile, on various social media platforms, users complained about slow data speeds.

A Reddit user known as nadamelankolik said their Internet speeds are barely 50kbps (kilobits per second). They are considering switching telcos, but coverage in rural areas is bad.

Another user on X (formerly Twitter), pardonmyrating, commented that the telco speed is supposed to be 3Mbps but “it is not in reality”.

Mohdfadilah Sani also wrote about his telco service being very slow, adding that his complaint to the Malaysian Communication and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) has been in vain.

“The unlimited plan is said to be 12Mbps, but it is actually not even 1Mbps,” he said.

Another user named JkLissa said that despite complaining daily, no improvement is made.

Zacknasri94 chipped in, saying that he complained about his download speed of 0.70 Mbps “but the text was not even read by them”.

“I am fed up, not knowing what to do with my low Mbps,” he said.