Why you should have a dialup account...
Broadband service providers in Malaysia are crap. I never once heard of anyone who is thoroughly happy with their service providers. There will definitely be frequent times when you can't connect to the internet, or the connection is crawling like a giant tortoise.
It's a very frustrating experience especially when you need to get something done over the internet urgently... such as replying a very important e-mail, transferring money via online banking, chatting with your far away sweetheart using Skype etc.
So what do you do? You call their Customer Service of course... and what do they do? Well, they will tell you to restart the modem, or restart your PC/laptop. Being desperate, you will listen to their every word and you restart and restart and restart... Still not working. Then they will say, "Oh... but your account looks okay in our system. Why don't you wait for a while and try again". So you wait and wait and wait and maybe after half a day, you get your connection back. After a while, you just give up hope on them and learn to just accept your "fate".
That is why you must always have a backup - a dialup account. Although dialup can be much slower but under these circumstances, it's better than none. Like this morning, I need to send out an important e-mail but found out that I couldn't connect via my broadband. I called the Customer Service and was told that they were having this problem for some areas since last night. I asked how long it would take and he said probably a day! Luckily I remembered my long forgotten dialup account and gave it a try. It worked perfectly.
Although dialup will not be much useful with Skype calls, Torrent downloads or YouTube videos; but for usual tasks such as e-mailing or online banking, they will be able to serve well. Talking about this, I should go topup my dialup account. Never know when I will need it.
