Colin Charles Agenda

Many have asked me why I’ve been actively talking about something called #yes4g. YES is the name of YTL Communications new WiMAX service, and there’s been a lot of hype built up around it. It launched on Friday, 19 November 2010, and it was deemed as a “historic day” for the nation.

If you care about standards and naming conventions, know that this is not a 4G service, by ITU definitions. It is for all intents and purposes a marketing term. The claim is 3-5x faster than regular 3/3.5G services. From a consumer standpoint, I believe most will not care if this is truly a 4G service or not – they just want speed delivered to them at good value. I was not at the press conference (duh, I’m not a representative of a media organisation), but you might want to read an excellent article by Wern Shen on what happened there, particularly the part about YES not being a 4G service (by ITU standards).

The Launch

I was lucky enough to get invited to the launch of this historic day. In fact, I don’t think the halls of the Marriott had ever been so full, considering the standing room audience. Highlights included:

• A live feed from London. The audio/video quality was very good, and I wonder how it was in London?
• There were talks from Francis Yeoh, the Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia Muhyiddin, and another minister, Rais Yatim. I found it amusing that there was no bacaan doa, but a praise to the “Lord Jesus to bless this day” by Francis. The day was clearly blessed with a good turnout, but the service since requires some work (more of which I’ll talk about later).
• There was a constant correlation made between GDP growth of a nation and broadband penetration.
• I found out that the average age of a Malaysian today is now 26 years of age.
• They made a very good YES Launch video. I found it rather muhibbah, very Malaysian. In fact all the adverts they have created are also very Malaysian.
• The CEO of YTL Communications, Wing Lee, had a few choice comments including the fact that with YES, you get all of performance, innovation and value, with no compromises. He also went on to add that your address book (on your phone) is your original social network – I wholeheartedly agree. Also, YTL is following a no contracts mentality largely because they do not believe in commitment plans. They believe business comes from earning customer loyalty.
• Some kid in London made a call to the Deputy Prime Minister using the YES network. The call from his mobile phone to the DPM’s was spotty at best. He then switched over to using their YES Life tool (available on Windows and Mac OSX, though I cannot find binaries for the latter) and this worked, including video. From what I gather this is just standard VoIP.

And that was the launch. It was wet and I had no interest to walk over to Lot 10 to check out the YES Concept store. In our goodie bags, we had a YES Go, aka a dongle (a RM99 value). A select few managed to get their grubby hands on a Huddle (a personal WiFi device, aka a MiFi device), and I’m thankful to be one of them. To date, I’ve only been playing around with the YES network using the Huddle, not preferring the dongle; a review of the Huddle is coming up soon.

The select few also managed to score some beers at Shook!, where we received our Huddles. Huddling around a Huddle? By golly that is what happened. Again, much thanks to the folk that invited me to both the launch and the little meet afterwards.

The Service Offering

What do you get with YES? Basically, 9 sen gives you either 3 megabytes of data, 1 minute of a voice call or 1 SMS. However, they couldn’t make it that simple: the more you use the service (i.e. by being a loyal customer), you will notice that rebates kick in, and the service becomes about 30% cheaper.

It is important to note that YES is not an all you can eat service, neither is it one with a quota. They are treating it as a utility. Voice and SMS today are already like utilities: you pay as you use the service. Data in Malaysia is generally all-you-can-eat (Streamyx, UniFI) or comes with a quota (on the mobile networks like DiGi, Maxis, Celcom). This is a very different, yet interesting model, and I certainly hope it does not set a precedent for other networks to follow suit.

So today, YES really is focused on mobility. It is clear by the two devices available at launch (dongle and Huddle), that it is not meant to replace your regular DSL or FTTH connection. It is at best meant to supplement it when you are mobile and on the move.

It is unclear if you have to pay for data that is being uploaded, or is it 9 sen for 3 megabytes being downloaded. In fact, it is also unclear if you have to pay to receive voice calls or SMS messages, but I find this to be highly unlikely as no other service in Malaysia currently does this (and while it would be breaking new ground, will kill the voice/SMS offering almost instantly).

Voice and SMS is not particularly useful if it only worked while you were on your laptop or desktop; so YTL will remedy this by launching a phone (in collaboration with Samsung, to be called the Buzz) sometime in December 2010. This phone will also be connected to the WiMAX network, and is unlikely to have any support for a GSM chip (so you’re dead in the water when you leave the country). All this is now merely speculation, so more on this when there is an actual device.

What is certain is that you will not be using your iPhone or BlackBerry on this YES network. Their Twitter careline does try to mention that it is possible via WiFi or 3G, but this is because you’ll be running a default VoIP client to keep it going. Basically anything that supports SIP should give you access to your 018-prefixed number.

Getting Started

I pre-registered for an account a few weeks ago, picking my user ID, telephone number and password. About a week ago, they said my telephone number had interconnect issues and I had the option to change it, or just wait till December when the interconnect issues were fixed. Interconnect issues simply means you can dial anyone with a 018-prefixed-number (technically, anyone on the YES network; it does not need to be a 018-prefix, consider Malaysia now has mobile number portability), but you would be unable to dial anyone else on any other network. I chose not to act as I did not imagine needing yet another voice number.

I took Saturday pretty easily, and only started playing with the service sometime in the early evening. It was clear that the network was going on and off at that time, and their gateway (172.20.196.1) seemed to be having some issues. Not long after, they switched it back on at full power; I was not the only one that noticed this. Through this, I found that they have no network status page, something I think is crucial for any ISP to have (to show service levels/quality of the network).

I then found out that this service is not truly prepaid. You need to pay a RM50 activation fee, and top-up your account with RM30 per month (at minimum). Any unused credit will be carried forward to the following months. The activation fee is something even pre-registered folk need to pony up.

In fact, if you pre-registered, chances are you still needed to register for a new account. Why? There was clearly some syncing that lacked in their databases (or probably no syncing – no one I know who pre-registered managed to just “sign-on”).

A common error you would see if you pre-registered and attempted to login would be: Persona Id not found (shot).

Signing up was not exactly easy. The YES team claim that their website was under attack from a distributed denial of service. Through some perseverance, I managed to sign up and activate my account. The signup process required your identity card number, address, and of course your race. No race, no signup.

Then came searching for my voice number. The suggestions would not work. I entered my current number and it would not work. The solution? Just enter four-digits and it will suggest a number based on those four digits. I’m willing to believe that this will be fixed when they get their website sorted out.

After that, all I had to do was pay using my credit card. Only Visa and MasterCard is accepted, and it looks like they are using Maybank for online transactions. This also means that you will need some further verification depending on what credit card you use – please note this by asking your bank.

Afterwards, you get an email stating that the payment had been made (4-digits of your credit card are hashed out). You also get an email with your plaintext password sent to you. This leads me to believe that the YES systems are not encrypting your password. Remember to use a unique, throwaway password, and use a tool to keep track of it. In fact, you regularly get emails with your plaintext password, so make sure you are accessing your email over HTTPS/IMAPS/POPS.

You should then go ahead and reload some credit to your account. As you can tell, that list does not seemed to be sorted.

Your credit card details are not saved in your account so everytime you want to reload, you will need to enter your credit card details. This, in my opinion, is quite annoying. But looking at the probable lacking security around the whole YES system, maybe this is a good thing (see above for plaintext password issue).

That’s it! The YES account is now ready, and you’re RM50 poorer (plus whatever amount you decided to reload).

The Network

The network is currently pretty reliable, compared to the 3G services offered by DiGi/Maxis/Celcom. I’ve yet to see it crawl, but its not as amazing as they’ve made it out to be. I’ve seen with real world tests (not just speedtest.net which isn’t too useful), that in some locations I can get 2.5mbps down/1.6mbps up. I’ve also seen it be as slow as 0.95mbps down/0.09mbps up. Ping times vary, around 92-233ms. As I write this piece, on average, I’m getting 2.45mbps down/0.11mbps up. All tests are based on connecting to a box hosted in the Jaring data centre, as well as two more boxes, one in London and one in California. Others have reported greater speeds, but it might be where their Huddle/dongles are located – I’ve been using everything indoors so far, in a few locations that I happen to be.

All YES customers get a public IP (IPv4). 183.78.x.x is your IP range. Some geolocation databases seem to be service up incorrect ads for the region, but it should be noted that APNIC has allocated the range of IPs to YTL Communications. The Huddle allows port forwarding or setting a DMZ host, so it is probable that you could run a server behind your YES connection; I am still unsure if your IP is fixed or dynamic, though so far I believe I’m getting the same IP on my Huddle.

MCMC has a content blacklist that they encourage ISPs to use. It turns out that the YES by default follows this particular blacklist, so forget looking at certain sites with objectionable content, unless you know how to workaround it.

Anyway, when DiGi first came out with their broadband offering, their network rocked too. YES is new, YES hardly has users (maybe 15,000 over the weekend?), so YES might change.

Behind The Scenes

I’m happy to note that the YES infrastructure is mixed-mode opensource and proprietary software.

• From errors like OBRM Error – Failed to check Persona ID existence from OBRM, it was quickly revealed (on Twitter nonetheless – thanks @l33tdawg, @alphaque, @yclian) that OBRM stood for Oracle Communications Billing & Revenue Management.
• From this article in MIS Asia, it seems that they’ve bought in a lot of Oracle tech: Oracle CRM On Demand, Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management, Oracle Database, and Oracle Contact Centre Anywhere.
• Over the weekend, and even now, there’s been lots of chatter on social media. I guess their tools from Buzzient will come in handy now. Customer Care 2.0 is about talking back to the customer and solving their problems on their platform of choice, but this is a matter for another post.
• They use the JBoss GateIn portal (opensource)
• For YES Mail, they run Atmail, with a pretty usable web interface. It is powered by Exim and other opensource tools.
• The webservers are not powered by IIS (rumour on Twitter?) but Apache.

Conclusion

This is YTL’s first foray into the communications space. This is probably their first foray into dealing with users. Users talk back these days so Team YES have had it difficult all weekend, and are still having it difficult. Just look at one platform: Twitter’s #yes4g hashtag.

The network works. The mail works. Their login to manage your Yes ID still does not work as I write this.

We’ve seen them abuse Google AdWords (well, their agency, Carat Media Services apologises). There has been a lot of hype, every newspaper I read has YES ads, and Edwin Yapp does ask: Is YES stumbling on its own hype?

To me, this launch seemed a little rushed. There should have been some kind of soft-launch. Just look at the image about online security for example – “One day however a small line of blind text by the name of Lorem Ipsum decided to leave for the far World of Grammar” – shows they’ve lacked QA and things have been rushed. In fact, today there is no way to check your usage quota. There’s a lot of finesse missing, so why the rush?

When I spoke to Francis Yeoh a few months ago, I asked him about his strategy (for the future when 4G is ratified) and what he will do come launch. He left me with one pertinent thing: “I’ll keep my engineers and management on their toes all the time to respond”. Respond to change, respond to requests, just respond.

I believe they are on their toes responding now. I even got a phone call from their call centre at 6.30pm on a Sunday. I don’t know if heads will roll in due time, considering they hired world class experts. Sometimes a company should look inwardly and realise there are many an expert sitting in Malaysia, and always remember the 7 P’s: Proper Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance.

Good luck YTL Communications. I’ll continue using the service, for mobility, and my next post on this topic will probably be about the Huddle.

Do you want to know about the service? Feel free to leave a comment.

Update (23-11-2010 18:00): Dinesh has a good writeup: YESterday, all my troubles seemed so far away.

Disclosure: I received a YES Go dongle (worth RM99) and a YES Huddle (worth RM399) as review units.

Resources

• Coverage Maps – important, since I don’t see this anywhere
• YES World
• YES Mail
• YTL Communications Speed Test
• YES is on Twitter: @YES4G and @YesCare
• Hack In The Box – watch them for their updates on security of the YES network (they’re upstanding chaps who will only disclose things once the network is fixed; they also went in to offer advice, gratis, to the YES network team on how to improve their network)

Just read a good CNBC article titled Bloggers: Asia’s Next Generation of Product Endorsers. Some highlights from Nielsen’s 2nd quarter Global Consumer Report:

• Over 60% of Asian consumers (compared to 43% globally) use social media – including social networking sites and blogs to help them make purchase decisions
• 6% of Asian consumers identified “influential bloggers” as one of their top 3 trusted sources when making a purchasing decision (compared to only 1% of North Americans and 2% of Europeans)
• In China, lots of new foreign brands are flooding the market, and customers have not formed brand loyalty yet, so influence helps
• Nuffnang’s company revenue grew nearly 250% this year, netting them about SGD$10 million, according to co-founder Cheo Ming Sheng
• Blogs popular with advertisers (on Nuffnang at least): women’s blog, focusing on families, with food and tech blogs coming in at a close second

“When you write an advertorial (online), there (must be) full disclosure that it’s an advertorial,” says Cheo. “It’s the same as an advertorial in a magazine or newspaper.”

Right on Cheo Ming Sheng. Good work Nuffnang. Bloggers, be clear, make sure you disclose clearly what an Advertorial is (newspapers and magazines clearly mark ADVERTORIALs). This will ensure that readers and the audience trust you (and trusting you grows trust in the advertising network too). And you do not mislead the audience (after all, with great power comes great responsibility).

Contrast this to the Nuffnang attitude two years ago (see: The Real Story behind Maxis Broadband). I sincerely believe that Nuffnang is having a coming of age and are realising that non-disclosure (see: Advertising & PR, Bloggers & Integrity: Making Money, While Being Honest which was a very popular talk at BarCampKL April 2009), click fraud, etc. is bad. I also believe that this is a natural progression as more and more people understand blogs, social media, and the social nature of the Internet. Largely in part due to traditional agencies playing an active role in this space. Oh, and let’s not forget metrics.

So kudos to you Nuffnang. May you set a good example for the rest of your competitors in this space. And all the best in expanding to new markets!

This was a story I told quite regularly at OSCON earlier this year and I thought I would share it with everyone here.

I have over the years mentioned that some things in the Linux world poise it to be “the year of the Linux desktop”. Many people say these things, in fact others in the Linux world tend to tell you not to mention it as it might jinx the movement. Well, this year, 2010 is almost coming to an end, so I doubt I would be jinxing anything.

Who cares if it is the year of the Linux desktop? If the mantra was to spread opensource, I think Google has done a bang up job of getting the word out that Android is opensource. I know some people reading that line will cringe and tell me that MeeGo is more opensource, Android is not opensource, etc.

I landed in SFO as usual and I told the immigration officer that I was headed to Portland for OSCON. He wanted to know what OSCON was, and I told him it was a conference where opensource people gathered. He asked me flat out: “You mean, opensource like Android?” I instantly smiled and we got on to talking about Android, mobile phones and he told me how he enjoyed his Android device and he thought that all of us in this “opensource movement” were doing a great thing for his phone. He did make use of the Android Marketplace and he did get quite a few apps from it (free though, he admitted).

I then boarded my connecting to PDX, arriving past midnight, I hit the sack. Breakfast was to be at Burgerville right before the Community Leadership Summit. The waitress asked me if I was in town for some kind of family reunion, and I told her that I was in town for OSCON. She inquired what OSCON was since she had not heard of it and this was the weekend before all the geeks descended upon her. I told her it was a gathering for opensource people, and felt a sense of deja vu when she retorted: “Opensource like Android?” By golly, she had purchased an Android phone, went into depths about the applications, told me more about how she used the Android Marketplace, how she purchased a few apps, but preferred free ones, and so on.

I was making conversation about opensource (and Android devices in particular) with an immigration officer and a waitress, all under twelve hours of me landing in the United States. Its 2010, and even if Linux isn’t king on the desktop, its king on people’s most personal device, their mobile phone. Its what they carry in their pockets, and it’s doing more and more for them as the technology iterates. And this revolution is powered by Linux.

I was in Bangkok recently, and met an Android user who just wanted to know the basics of getting stuff working on his Android. Simple things like tethering, making it into a WiFi hotspot, and more were questions he had.

I whipped my Nexus One out and told him it all just worked. It’s running Android 2.2. He was impressed. He thought he was also running Android 2.2, until I checked. It was some HTC make that he had purchased recently (circa mid-to-late-2009), and it was running Android 1.6 (if I remember correctly). The fact that I cannot remember is in itself a problem for Android device manufacturers – there are so many out there, and while its great to have choice, it sure as heck complicates things. But that’s a matter for another post.

I told him to get the software upgraded. He had gone back to his place, tried it out, and it didn’t work, since there was no update available. Lucky for him, HTC happened to be a sponsor for BarCamp Bangkok 4. So he went up to their booth to ask, and they told him flat out, there was no Android 2.2 available for his phone. He would have to buy one, and there seemed to be a THB1,000 discount.

This was a phone that is no older than a year. Its similar to my Nexus One in age. It is not operator locked, there is no contract, yet with these Android phones, you are at the mercy of your manufacturer to release a software update to your phone. What is their incentive, considering they are rolling out new hardware on such a regular basis?

I look at Apple, and see iOS4. Support for it goes back all the way to the iPhone 3G (released in 2008). So it does not work on the original iPhone released in 2007, and multitasking only works on the iPhone 3GS (2009) and the new iPhone 4 (2010). But it seems like Apple is giving it a good three year release cycle of support so far.

Android has about a six-month release cycle for the operating system. Device manufacturers are probably releasing new hardware around that time-frame. While people are raving about statistics that over 70% of Android devices out there are running some form of Android 2.x (either 2.1: 40.8% or 2.2: 36.2%), it still leaves about 30% not getting a lot of functionality. Heck, functionality that only 36% of Android users get, the others want! Again I ask: what is a manufacturer’s incentive to release software updates, considering they are rolling out new hardware on such a regular basis?

There is no consistent user-experience across the board. What works on my clean install Android device, is very different to what others who have software carriers mucking with the software, as well as the handset manufacturers. They’re not getting the “pure” Android experience, and they are unable to share experiences with others.

Gingerbread, aka Android 2.3 is just around the corner. It will (likely) work on my Google-issue HTC Nexus One. It will not work on all those other beautiful devices out there, until their manufacturers say they should.

I was rather thrilled this past week to note that the team at MoSync have released 2.4-pre-beta, with support for not only Microsoft Windows XP/Vista/7, but also Apple Mac OS X 10.6. Goodbye Windows virtual machine, and hello native Mac app.

Check out the release notes, and you’ll also see some very interesting tid-bits. The largest request that I seem to hear from users is that they would like to target the iOS platforms. Apple iOS devices seem ubiquitous these days, and MoSync is now filling the gap. The highlights:

• support for iOS devices (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad) – read hints to help develop iOS applications (you want to read this, especially if you’re doing some development on Windows; you will need XCode and a Mac to run it)
• Android 2.2 support – read hints to help develop Android applications
• ARM recompiler for Symbian 3rd and 5th edition devices
• Bluetooth client/server library

There’s also improved documentation, with example applications. Check out btServer (makes use of the Bluetooth features) and MapDemo (good example with various map sources).

While there are no binaries for Linux users, there is a guide on how to build MoSync using Ubuntu. I’ve not tried it recently, and the guide is a bit dated, but I expect it to work without too many issues.

I learned about Unsubscribe.com, from Fred Wilson’s recent post about how he works towards achieving Inbox Zero. I don’t use GMail as my main client, preferring to currently use Apple Mail after I ditched Thunderbird earlier this year. However, most of my email accounts are now based on GMail, thanks to the wonders of Google Apps for Domains.

Unsubscribe is exactly what I’ve been after. I get subscribed to a lot of mailing lists and instead of marking things as spam (sometimes in my MUA, sometimes on GMail), I’d rather just get off the mailing list so it does not clog up Google’s servers. Another problem is that my oldest email account is now fifteen years old, so it tends to get clogged up with quite a lot of crap.

Signing up was easy. Installing the plugin for Firefox was also easy. Hitting the limit of five email unsubscribes per month was dead easy! I had to quickly grab my credit card and get the limit lifted (if only they offered Paypal as an option).

I ended up using it in a mixed-mode environment. I tried to use it in the browser for some of my various Google Apps for Domains accounts. It worked a charm. Then I moved back to my MUA, and started forwarding emails to mail@unsubscribe.com. That too, worked a charm. One click (and one forward) unsubscribe is just too easy.

Considering I have too many email accounts and not all of them have GMail access, I had to write their support line a quick email. Within a few hours, they fixed my problem – they whitelisted all my email addresses, and if I need more, they’ll gladly whitelist more. They also told me that they’re working on an interface to allow users to add their own email addresses.

Service within a few hours. Absolutely love it. Can smell that they are a great startup to watch. Well worth the USD$19/year fee.

Update: In the 2 days that I’ve been using it, on day 1 I got off 78 mailing lists, and on day 2 another 51.