Celcom 3G Broadband crawls like GPRS.

“Fast download & streaming”? How ironic!

I still remember how I tried to get myself online during my last trip to Kuala Lumpur in June 2009 and did not manage to find this pre-paid 3G Broadband package by Celcom.

The only stop-gap solution was to get connected at the free wifi spots, including standing in the middle of nowhere at Mid Valley Megamall just to leech on an internet access point. The convenience stores do not carry this pre-paid package and I only saw the Celcom shop at Sungei Wang on the last day of my previous trip to Kuala Lumpur.

This time round, I headed to Sungei Wang on the first evening of my working trip and got this Pre-paid 3G Broadband Package at RM25, for a weak week access. Little did I know that the connection is this weak! I could only get connected to 1 website at a time when I was in my hotel room at Hotel Capitol and it crawled like GPRS! My colleague who stayed in Concorde Hotel could not even get connected!

This was when I started to miss my 3G broadband connections in Singapore by SingTel and Starhub.

We were lucky that the conference venue at Shangri-la Hotel offered free wifi coverage in their ballrooms. All of us were busy checking our emails during break times.

I did switch the Celcom 3G sim card into my iPhone 3G from the third day onwards. While it still crawled, the applications that I used on iPhone 3G consumed less data and hence loaded faster (not fast).

If you really need to get connected in Kuala Lumpur, Celcom 3G Broadband is only good enough for your mobile phone, but not using it on a computer with a 3G Modem. Leeching on free wifi will be a better choice, seriously.