Celcom Xpax Data Connection is so poor!

Is Axiata Celcom Xpax data connection so poor? My Maxis line has not been able to get good signal strength in my home, and was wondering whether Celcom could be any better. The only way to know is to get a prepaid line and give it a test. Who knows? I might just get lucky!

Celcom was a pioneer for mobile phone technology and I heard they have one of the best coverage. Before I switched to Maxis some 20 years ago, I was using Celcom analogue mobile system. Nope, not the Motorola "brick" phone thankfully! It was the Microtac or something named like this from Motorola. Then came Maxis with their GSM system, and my friend persuaded me to change to Maxis and I have been with Maxis ever since.

I have never considered any other mobile telephone operator until now when I could not get any decent mobile signal strength from Maxis after moving to a new house. I recalled the previous owner was using Celcom line so I thought perhaps that telco should be getting good signal.

My Internet was blocked by bad DNS

My internet connection was working fine just the day before. And this morning when I powered up my PC, no connection could be established. I didn’t know I have a bad DNS problem and was wondering what could be wrong.

I checked my other PC in the LAN network including my mobile phone and they all could connect online. Looking at the error message, it said it was blocked by my browser. So the first thing that came to mind was my PC firewall. The quick way to test it was switching off the firewall. Unfortunately, no connection could be established.

The next step was to try disabling the anti-virus. Even that didn’t work.

Trying to pinpoint the error, I tried running other browsers. Perhaps my current Google Chrome browser was getting cranky. Unfortunately, Mozilla Firefox and Opera browser didn’t work either.

Finally, after giving the error message a second look, I realized the error message came from Open DNS. In my bid to overcome the blocking of certain sites by the Malaysian government, I have switched from TM net DNS primary/secondary servers to those of overseas.

A quick change on my Local Area Connection properties TCP/IPv4 Primary and Secondary DNS server address to another one, voila! My connection was established. This time I switched over to Google’s DNS server.

So most likely the Open DNS gateway servers were down, or they too started implement some kind of blocking procedure. Fortunately I still have some other alternate choices to try.

Well that solved my problem, though it took me about 2 hours to figure it out! What a time waster!

DNS Servers in Malaysia and Overseas

Every now and then, I would tinker with my router modem and network adapters. In most cases DHCP would be fine. But some of the legacy devices like my very old HP Laser Jet 5000 series printer as well as our re-cond all-in-on Ricoh photocopier machine (although fairly new, but uses some very old network communication protocols) worked better with a fixed network IP protocol.

For small office like mine, manually configuring each PC to a fixed IP was not such a big issue. However when setting the Internet Protocol TCP/IPv4 from DHCP to manual settings, the "obtain DNS servers address automatically" sections gets grayed out.

So I would need to key in the DNS servers manually in order for internet connection to work. Scrounging around the internet, I managed to gather all the local DNS Servers as well as some international ones too! I set up this list because I can't remember the DNS server address, so this post was made as sort of a note for me for quick access!

Streamyx is absolutely bad today!

It's been a week long and Streamyx is still trying to fix its server or junction box or whatever. The connection is intermittent and if I do connect, is absolutely horrendously slow! Sent from Yahoo! Mail on Android

[update 13/10/11]

How is one suppose to work if streamyx slows down to a crawl every few days? And this is definitely got nothing to do with the damaged undersea cable to the USA. Even accessing local website and data is so, so, so slow! Thumbs down yet again for streamyx. I think there is too many problems with streamyx for the month of October.

Streamyx down again due to Sg Way exchange problem

And yet again, my office streamyx was down again. Just last week we couldn't connect for more than 24 hours due to streamyx server problem. And now due to an exchange junction in Sungai Way the internet was down since 6am this morning.

Couldn't do any work until they fix it. So no choice but to wait for a few more hours. I requested to boss to switch to UNIFI. Perhaps that would resolve some of the frequent downtime of streamyx. The cost will double and there is no guarantee it will have more uptime since it is under the telecom company namely TM.

I have a friend who was complaining like mad about his poor download speed from UNIFI. Never getting the 80-90% of the stated speed. But basically UNIFI should be working according to as much as the stated figure.

Anyway never know until try. But once in will have to use it for the contract period.

Meanwhile my recent upgrade to windows 7 has left my dial-up modem dead. There is no drivers for it. So I can't even use the old slow dial-up to access internet.

Only a quick tap here using my mobile phone to kvetch a little!

---[update 11/10/11] ---

Maxis Multi-SIM 1 Line

Finally went and applied for the Maxis multi-SIM 1 line service. I think it would be useful considering that I got spare mobile phones here and there. Besides, my Sony Ericsson X10 mini pro battery seems to knock out very fast these days. So perhaps a second phone with the same line might come in handy. However, after getting the new multi-SIM card it didn't work with my X10. Hopefully when the 2nd line SIM card becomes activated would work. Now waiting for activation which takes 24 hours. So keeping my fingers crossed. Otherwise I would need to visit the Maxis center again to sort out the issue.

Meanwhile, I'm using the main SIM on my old Palm Centro nicknamed 'the Whiteberry'! Haha! The SIM card has no issue with this mobile phone.
It's been a long while since I typed on the teenie weenie keyboard so it is a little slow to tap out this blog!