By using the Yes Life app, users can avoid roaming charges. The app allows you to make (and receive) carrier-grade calls using any broadband networks – WiFi or 3G (not necessary Yes 4G broadband service). Someone just tested it on McDonald’s WiFi and said “No lag and the voice is quite clear too.” Users can call Malaysian numbers with RM0.09 per minute; RM0.09 for each SMS sent. IDD rate starting from RM0.09 per minute for calls to over 200 countries.

With FaceTime app, iPad and iPod Touch users can already video-chat with one another over Wi-Fi. With mobile social text-messaging tools like Kik Messenger, Mogwee and Facebook’s Beluga, users can exchange instant messages with one another. So, where are the propositions for the Yes Life app? Key differentiators possibly include a personal mobile number, send SMS to other mobile numbers, carrier-grade mobile voice calls, Quality of Service for its 4G network and maybe, app performance.

Looking forward to hear comments from Microsoft/Skype and Viber about these performance results.

Now, Yes Life for iOS app users will get RM5 free credits pre-loaded (valid until July 12 2011). Android and BlackBerry versions will be available soon.

Interfaces of Yes Life app

Some other latest details about the Yes 4G services:

• Since March 2011, data volume increased by 117% (from 104TB to 226TB), voice by 75% (from 1 Million minutes to 1.75 million minutes) and SMS messages sent by 28% (from 670,000 to 859,000).
• Yes Life for PC, downloaded 55,000 times already.
• Yes network with 1700 base stations, to date.

Yes Life video

YTL launches Yes Life app for iOS, competing with FaceTime, Skype, Kik, Beluga, etc. originally appeared on GreyReview.com on May 12, 2011.

A Rough Calculation of Revenue

This is an attempt to calculate revenue generated by YTL from its 4G Mobile Internet users. YTL is charging 9 cents for 3 megabytes of data usage. Refer to [7] in table above, the average data usage per user is 1,040 megabytes. So, the average revenue per user is RM31.20.

With a total of 100,000 users, Yes generated RM3.12 million in the past 15 weeks. And so far, YTL invested a total of RM2.5 billion in its 4G infrastructure.

Estimating the ARPU of YTL Yes 4G mobile Internet service originally appeared on GreyReview.com on March 6, 2011.

A thread started by the owner of the popular VPN service, BolehVPN, in the Lowyat.net forum has grown to 109 pages, with subscriber after subscriber posting their bandwidth speed test results evidencing this cap.

TM apparently has taken cognizance of these complaints and its Vice President of Corporate Communications, Izlyn Ramli, released an official response:

Telekom Malaysia Bhd ™ wishes to clarify on our Fair Usage Policy (FUP) and address several comments in the blogosphere on allegations of a ‘hard cap’ for international bandwidth being enforced by TM.

Firstly, we apologise for the inconvenience that our customers are currently facing on our internet services.

We would like to assure all our customers that it is not, in any way TM’s intention to enforce any ‘hard caps’ on our customers.

As a matter of principle, however, TM needs to abide by a FUP to ensure that the network caters to all customers in a fair manner, and this has been in place for a few years for Streamyx which is a contended, best effort service. This means the Streamyx network is catered to be shared by everybody at any point in time to ensure everybody gets a “fair share” of the bandwidth. Currently UniFi is not affected, as it is a new premium service.

The Streamyx “Fair Usage Policy” is available on our website (http://www.streamyx.com/customer_care/customer_care.php?id=customer_care_fair_usage_policy) and it basically describes the list of specific heavy usage activities (like P2P and gaming) that will be managed during peak periods.

As you all know, this kind of bandwidth management or FUP is a global and common telco and celco industry practice. It is already in place in Malaysia amongst the mobile broadband players and aimed at making sure our broadband service is fast and reliable whenever in use. It is designed to benefit all users, especially normal or non-heavy users during peak periods, so that all can enjoy higher and fair browsing and surfing speed.

In general, TM’s FUP and implementation is aimed at providing an optimum internet experience to all Streamyx customers by rationalising the internet speed during peak periods (3pm – 1am).

Of late, our traffic profiles are changing quite rapidly, and we are noticing that network congestion can hit different parts of the country at different times of the day or week. When congestion hits, depending on the usage patterns, customers subscribing to the same package but generating different traffic patterns may experience different levels of service performance.

In an effort to ensure a fair distribution of resources amongst all customers at all times, whenever congestion occurs, TM’s network is able to calculate how many users are active at any given time and allocate dynamically the resources across all customers with active sessions.

In rare cases of heavy congestion, we ensure that no customers may get below a minimum threshold of international bandwidth, but there is no ‘ceiling’ to the bandwidth each customer can get.

The problems some customer are experiencing now may have stemmed post a successful pilot of a new traffic management model we ran a few months before, following which we went nationwide about 3 weeks ago. Clearly there is room for improvement and we are working hard to resolve this.

As dynamic allocation of bandwidth requires some specific settings that need to be fine tuned area by area, we elicit and welcome feedback on the experience in different parts of the country at different times of the day. We have set up a special email account where you can send your readings for our review: impact@tm.com.my effective 1 December 2010.

From our analysis, the current traffic patterns are, for most part, in line with our expectations on traffic management, and the speeds being delivered should suffice for a smooth internet experience.

Where the internet experience falls short, we will further investigate both individual cases and the service in its entirety to address specific concerns that they may be facing, and will respond to these customers directly.

Rest assured, TM takes note of all customer feedback to continuously ensure improved customer experience end-to-end.

From a market communications perspective, the FUP awareness campaign is already ongoing and we will further clarify as to the rules we are implementing – and why.

In fact, a bloggers briefing has already been scheduled for 17 December post our engagement with LYN and Kambingz earlier. About 40-50 selected bloggers will be invited to represent the wider blogger community to keep them abreast with our efforts to improve service delivery and customer experience overall, and to seek constructive feedback on these efforts. We hope to address, or at least start to address many concerns at this forum.

We thank you for your continuous feedback and ask for your kind understanding and patience as we work to deliver on our commitment to service quality and overall customer experience.

TELEKOM MALAYSIA BHD

In a nutshell, the slow international traffic experienced by Streamyx subscribers was caused by a new bandwidth management system coined by TM as FUP (Fair Usage Policy) which was deployed about 3 weeks ago to regulate traffic during peak hours; i.e. 3pm-1am. The system was supposed to assist in equally distributing the available bandwidth to all users, especially during peak hours, but instead of doing that, it is throttling everyone on a consistent and widespread basis.

Dato’ Sri Zamzamzairani Mohd Isa, CEO of TM also appeared on BFM radio this morning to address this issue. While defending the need for the FUP, Dato’ Zam said that TM will temporarily halt the implementation of the FUP pending review. He mentioned:

“We will find a way out immediately, today we are looking at some parameters that will allow the equilibrium of usage. If it’s still a challenge in the next 1-2 days, I’m going to pull that out first and then we will relook, get feedback from our users and see how we can do this better.”

You can listen to the full interview here.

Our latest check at the current postings in the aforementioned Lowyat forum thread reveals that the removal of the FUP cap is indeed in progress, with many subscribers reporting that their international bandwidth speed is back to normal.

It remains to be seen if TM will reinstate the FUP in the near future. If they do decide to do so, it would need to be properly regulated rather than just arbitrarily capping subscribers’ speed regardless of their usage. But most importantly, TM should inform its subscribers publicly through all available channels rather than implementing a system which would affect them without their knowledge. This is necessary in order to avoid the backlash like the one they have just faced.

UPDATE:  2nd December 2010

A visit to the LYN thread above showed that the cap is still being applied despite some relaxation thereof yesterday evening. This writer’s 4MB Streamyx line was also severely capped the whole of yesterday evening (average download speed was less than what one would expect from a 1MB line) and normal speed only returned at about 7am this morning. Hopefully Dato’ Zam keeps his word and pulls out the system in the next couple of days as it is obviously creating a plethora of problems for both individual and business users.

Telekom Malaysia (TM) suffers backlash from Streamyx subscribers over Fair Usage Policy originally appeared on GreyReview.com on December 1, 2010.

GreyReview has obtained some explanations (published below, in verbatim) from YTL Communications, via its PR agency, on issues surrounding the Yes launch:

Attack on Yes.my

The threat was detected an hour after the launch. We started noticing that a large number of requests sent to www.yes.my could not be made by human users due to the nature of IP addresses and their sheer volume.

It took about 24 hours to resolve the problem. Anyone who has ever been flooded with illegitimate requests to the website, would understand the complicated nature of dealing with it. It’s like trying to spot a thief in a stream of people on the street. We had to weed the hostile from genuine requests coming in at the same time to our portal.

The issue with malicious traffic to our portal has been fully resolved.

GreyReview’s insert: According to this news report, Yes website was allegedly targeted by malicious hackers and received “as many as 300,000 hits a second”. According to YTL’s CEO Wing K. Lee: “On top of legitimate customer traffic, we also experienced a series of hostile attacks. As a result, we had to take tedious steps of filtering individual blocks of IP addresses to stop the malicious attacks.”

On why some subscribers can’t access Yes 4G broadband service last weekend:

A very significant number of customers have pre-registered for our service and the loading of a small percentage of their Yes ID’s into the portal was inadvertently slowed down by the portal issue. Without completing their registration on www.yes.my, customers could not use their devices.

However a large number of customers – more than 15,000 of them, have gone to our Yes stores at Lot 10 and KL Sentral and to our partner IT retailers over the weekend and are using our service with a great delight, reporting good speeds and reliable service.

Just to reiterate, all issues we had, were restricted only to the portal. Our Yes 4G network remains unaffected and is working smoothly.

On the use of the term ’4G’ for its broadband service:

ITU decided which technologies are to be officially designated as 4G, only recently. We, on the other hand, started this project 2 years ago, at the time when there was no official definition for 4G. While 3G is primarily voice centric and was later on adapted to handle data, WiMAX is an all-IP technology, built from the ground up for data transfer and to support the new type of high speed, bandwidth-hungry Internet applications. Therefore, to call it a new generation technology, or 4G, was apt.

GreyReview’s insert: On October 21 2010, WirelessMAN-Advanced (next generation of WiMax) and LTE-Advanced, “being accorded the official designation of IMT-Advanced, qualifying them as true 4G technologies,” by International Telecommunication Union (ITU). On November 23 2010, ITU Member States formally ratified these wireless technologies as 4G. So, it will probably take another year or so for the development of in-depth technical standards for these technologies. And one of the ITU-recommended features for IMT-Advanced (4G) is “enhanced peak data rates to support advanced services and applications (100 Mbit/s for high and 1 Gbit/s for low mobility..)“

However, our brand is Yes. Whatever you call the technology that currently supports our Yes service we are all about making positive change in this country and helping our customers do amazing things with a reliable and fast mobile broadband. I believe those are the only things most of our customers really care for.

###

It remains to be seen if Yes can overcome these early stumbling blocks and deliver its full potential to its subscribers. However, in the past few days, positive signs are trickling in. We’re seeing some positive feedbacks from Yes users, particularly on its speed.

Yesterday, CEO Wing Lee announced complimentary data services, up to 10GB free for every Yes subscribers, until December 19th 2010. And the deadline for pre-registered customers to activate their accounts has been extended to December 12th 2010.

Need for Speed

No doubt, we need more bold and innovative broadband offerings in this country. In terms of broadband speed, Malaysia still languishes in the bottom-half of this latest global ranking (rank 38 out of 50 countries – see table below) – with countries like Thailand, Ukraine, Chile, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, and Columbia ahead of Malaysia.

Backed by a giant Malaysian conglomerate YTL Corporation Berhad, Yes is indeed a force to be reckon with and its mobile broadband service is a welcome addition to the industry. Yes’ entrant can invigorate the broadband ecosystem in this country and further catalyze the emergence of even more innovative offerings. Competition prevails, consumers eventually win.

Yes 4G broadband launch marred by phantom menace (including latest YTL explanations) originally appeared on GreyReview.com on November 25, 2010.

More like a teaser, the picture reveals that for 9 sen, Yes offers 3mb of data, 1 minute usage and 1 sms on a pay-as-you-use basis, which is actually quite reasonable as it translates to only 3 sen per mb of data. By comparison, TuneTalk offers 5 sen per mb and that is on EDGE.

Image credits: Albert Ng

YTL Yes 4G broadband pricing leaked on Twitter originally appeared on GreyReview.com on November 18, 2010.

A check on the service provider’s website reveals that it has started an online pre-registration campaign to allow those who are interested in signing up for the service to pick a unique Yes ID and 018 mobile number. The website also reveals that Yes.my is actually the front for YTL Communications Sdn Bhd, which is a subsidiary of YTL Corporation Bhd, the largest non-government linked company in the 2010 MB100 survey of Malaysia’s Largest Listed Companies.

It will be interesting to see if YTL Communications Sdn Bhd or any of its marketing arms actually got the go-ahead from Lucasfilm Ltd. (George Lucas is the Founder and Chairman of the company), which owns the rights to Star Wars and its bevy of characters, to utilize the Stormtroopers characters to promote its fledgling service provider. Knowing how litigious Lucasfilm and its principal George Lucas can get (see here and here, for example), it can get pretty messy for the upstart service provider (and its parent company) should they fail to obtain any prior approval for usage of these characters.

Image credits: YES Troopers photos by Henry Lee and Stormtrooper cartoon by Joe Wight.

Bold 4G Marketing by YTL: Did Lucas say Yes too? originally appeared on GreyReview.com on November 14, 2010.

Revolution Not Evenly Distributed (Yet)

At the initial stage, UniFi will cover four areas – Bangsar, Subang Jaya, Taman Tun Dr Ismail and Shah Alam. As of today, there’s 311,000 premises passed and by end of 2010, TM aims to cover 48 exchange areas with a total of 750,000 premises passed (premises passed refers to the number of UniFi-ready premises). By 2012, approximately 1.3 million premises will be passed nationwide – include inner Klang Valley, Iskandar Malaysia adn key industrial sites across the nation. So, 1(hsbb-enabled)Malaysia has to wait.

With the introduction of HSBB (UniFi), it seems Streamyx users are ‘second-class’ users (categorized as “Broadband for the General Public, BBGP). There are over 1.43 million BBGP customers, to date. To the many who tweet #streamyxsucks on Twitter, fret not! Last year, TM spent 3.6% or RM308 million of its revenue to improve its quality of service. This year, TM planned to spend at least 5%. The end of #Streamyxsucks, as we know it? Doubtful. Is #UniFi the #Streamyxsucks slayer? Maybe “RM11.3 billion” later, we will find out. ¶

Short, Shaky Video of the Launch

Telekom Malaysia (TM) Unveils #UniFi High Speed Broadband to Slay #Streamyxsucks originally appeared on GreyReview.com on March 25, 2010.

The Study is conducted by the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford and the University of Oviedo’s Department of Applied Economics; sponsored by Cisco. To determine the Broadband Quality Score, the researchers analyzed a total of 24 million records sourced from broadband tests using Speedtest.net (Ookla) during May 2008 and May – July 2009

This year, the study covers a total of 66 countries (and 13 are from Asia); additional 24 countries compared to 2008, plus new analysis on broadband quality in more than 240 cities. In terms of Broadband Leadership score, among Asian countries, Malaysia is behind South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan; ahead of China and India.

Asian Countries and Broadband Leadership, Broadband Quality Score and Penetration 2009

In the Broadband Leadership Matrix, Malaysia is placed in between ‘Leap Frog’ group and ‘Catch up’ group.

Malaysia is among the countries with the slowest download speed; only faster than South Africa, Tunisia, India, Indonesia, Egypt, Nigeria and Kenya.

Download Speed, by Country

In terms of Broadband Quality Score, Malaysia is in the ‘Below Today’s Applications Threshold’ category.

Broadband Quality Score, by Country

More about the Broadband Quality Study here.

Malaysian Broadband is ‘Below Today’s Applications Threshold’: Broadband Quality Study 2009 originally appeared on GreyReview.com on October 2, 2009.

The Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC), custodian of the MSC Malaysia, will spearhead the implementation of ICON, with the ultimate aim of unleashing groundswell of vibrant and sustainable digital content industry in Malaysia. Currently, MDeC is inviting individuals and companies to submit project proposals for the ICON programme. Malaysians and majority-owned Malaysian companies are eligible to apply for the Grant. But, is it hard to apply for the grant? To answer the question, here’s our not-so-famous 3-step Unofficial Guide.

INGREDIENTS LIST
1. Cool Ideas
2. Time
3. Official Forms: Project Application and Company Information.

DIRECTIONS

Step 1: Ideation (ETA: 1 week to 2 weeks)
Basically, the grant programme covers user-generated (ICONity) and educational (ICONedu) contents, for web and mobile. For ICONity, It can be a project to repurpose existing offline contents for online or web application for community with incorporation of user-generated contents. For ICONedu, educational contents can be for lifelong learning, from young children to senior citizen, and interactive learning tools like games and simulations, among others.

Think. Be creative. What content you plan to bring online? How can you repurpose your existing content? Which community you want to engage with using your content? Can you add more interactivity to your offline educational contents?

Step 2. Creation (ETA: 2 to 3 weeks)
Get the preformatted Application Forms to draft your project proposal. Extend and expand your ideas, in terms of commercialization, technology and financial. Good thing is you’re not expected to produce a thick project proposal! Each section with words limit, ranging from 125 words to 400 words. So, focus on brevity.

Here are the key sections you need to elaborate in the Project Application form, pertaining to your project idea:

• Value Proposition: What are the compelling factors of your idea? How can it benefits the various stakeholders? Also, outline the benefits your project can contribute to the National Broadband Plan.
• Market Target and Business Model: Who’s your primary (and secondary) target markets? And what are the market size and industry projection? Quote figures and market growth stats from reputable sources, if possible.
• Competitive Analysis: List out key competitors and how you can carve unique advantage over their offerings.
• Marketing Plan: Outline your marketing plan here and how you plan to go-to-market plan. Here you are requested to outline what commercialization activities you will undertake after completion of the project
• Content Development: A brief on how you plan to develop content for your proposed project. Also, how these contents can benefit the Malaysian National Broadband Plan.
• Technology Plan: Describe your technology implementation of your project. With words-limitation, a diagram goes a long way in helping the Approval Committee to construct a mental image of what you are planning to develop.
• Project Expenditure: Each applicant can apply up to RM100,000 with maximum project duration of 8 months. The grant money can be used for human resource, awareness/promotion campaigns, activities related to repurposing contents, content hosting and procurement of services.
• Project Activities Schedule: Provide details of your project activities, key deliverables and timeline

For more in-depth details, download the Infopacks for both ICONity and ICONedu. Also, do check out this useful blog posting titled ‘Early Stage Web Product Development,’ which is packed with information related to product design, development and management.

Step 3. Submission (ETA: 1 day)
For official submission, print out 2 hardcopy and 1 softcopy (in CD) together with Company Forms (Form 9, 24, 49). Send to the Secretariat of the ICON Grant Programme (address available in the Application Forms). For queries, email icon [at] mdec [dot] com [dot] my or visit the ICON’s official website.

There you go! Just submit your project idea to MDeC and if it’s approved, you’ll get up to RM100,000 to transform your idea into reality. No processing fee required. No payback. And the Government will not take any stake in your venture once it’s completed. Good luck!

The Unofficial Guide to MSC Malaysia ICON Grant Application (Forms Included) originally appeared on GreyReview.com on September 1, 2009.