Yoyoyo, today is a public holiday, instead of resting at home or go patoh, I decided to test out the new kid in wireless broadband in Malaysia. It’s none other than P1 Broadband which I have signed up at the recent PC Fair in KLCC. Take about fast service, I received their password the next day. All good.

I am now at one of the dedicated hot zones in Bandar Puteri, Puchong for this purpose; Simply Penang. The other two dedicated hot zones are Hai Siang Kopitiam and Min Xian Restaurant. Check out the coverage map in Bandar Puteri below.

Simply Penang has a few power sockets which you can use for your laptop. The first socket I tried didn’t work out as the socket was I little loose. Luckily the friendly waitress… who by the way is pretty and quite a looker, helped me with another socket. For my whole 1 hour plus here, I totally enjoyed looking at her. Wahahaha…

I ordered myself a glass of ice blended chocolate… looks nice, tastes even better. Cool and refreshing. Ready to give the much hyped P1 a spin!

The P1HotZone ssid is detected without any problem at all. Although the wireless signal is damn low at 1 tiny bar only, I managed to connect to it effortlessly.

You do not need to provide any WEP to connect to the network because it’s unsecured. Different from the wireless network you use at home or in your office, eh?

Make sure the IP address and DNS server settings are set to obtain automatically. This should apply to all free WIFI services such as those at Starbucks.

Once the above is done, fire up Firefox and it will automatically redirect to P1’s website for you to login. Ah… now that’s where we make use the username and password they sms to us!

Problem started here… the login page itself was very slow… and so did the login process. Took me more than 10 minutes to finally login. You thought after this it should be smooth sailing but no… the speed was so slow I couldn’t even load my blog even after I waited for 10 minutes! Damn!

Gave up after waiting patiently for 10-15 minutes. I don’t get it. How come the speed was so slow… remember, Simply Penang is one of the dedicated hot zones in Bandar Puteri. Could it be due to I was seated at the far end of the restaurant? But this is a dedicated hot zone!

In the end I have to switch to Simply Penang’s WIFI. Got the WEP from the pretty waitress. Their WIFI is so much better as it’s not only easier to connect, it’s lightning fast too. Now, in order for broadband providers like P1 to succeed, they really have to double up their services especially with more and more restaurants offering free WIFI these days!

p/s. P1 broadband, worry not. I will test out your broadband at some other hot zones and give good reviews at some other time.