If you’re a Malaysian, then for this past week you can’t help it but to notice those large banners hanging from ceiling in Lot 10, KL Sentral and many other places? One might wonder how much money has been put into a marketing campaign this huge and who’s funding it. Well, it’s too easy to know that this is one of YTL Corporation’s latest investment, YTL Communication’s WiMAX mobile broadband service; YES4G.

I want drama so that you, and me can dance together

Now, before you flame me over here, I won’t comment anything on this Yes4G and it’s drama regarding the usage of the term 4G despite not being 4G at all. From my perspective, anything faster than the usual 3G and HSPA can be called whatever they want. Keep your pants on, the term 4G has been used in various marketing campaign by other telco’s; Sprint 4G, Clearwire 4G, T-Mobile, and dude, even Huawei is using the term 4G to promote their product in Bangladesh. Term aside, how YTL Comms and these other service providers are gonna explain the real 4G when it’s released, I really don’t wanna know. What I know is, that now in Malaysia we have another competitor of Streamyx. I imagine that they’ll inform their subscriber when the real 4G technology really comes up, but for now, this is as hell is awesome.

Background

A little background of Yes 4G. It was the idea of Tan Sri Dato’ Francis Yeoh, YTL Corporation’s Managing Director to bring faster and cheaper internet plan to Malaysia. He then sought out WiMAX license. He then sought out key figures like Wing K Lee and co-operation from giants such as Cisco, Samsung, Clearwire, CGT Semiconductor as partners.

Launch

I was also invited by YTL to attend the launch of YES 4G on last Friday, Nov 19 at the JW Marriot Hotel. It was huge, and a whole lot of people was there with expectation of looking at a new player in Malaysian broadband space, and there was even standing room audience. What ensued in the launch was:

- Live feed from London featuring a YES 4G backdrop and a whole bunch of Malaysian students hanging around. The preview was in HD, very impressive.
- Speech from Francis Yeoh, mentioning the term “government” 8 times in his 15 minutes speech.
- Speech from Rais Yatim, who started in Malay, changing the term “YES” to “YA!” and then changing to English in British accent in order for those listening to live feed to understand him. Sigh….
- Some more speech from Deputy Prime Minister.
- Launching Yes 4G by lifting a backdrop of earth with their hands.
- Launch videos, one of them featuring @avrilchan!!
- Wing, came up to stage and gave us a whole preview of what YES is and what it can do, and he did it Steve Jobs style. Awesome!
- Live call from London via a normal phone to DPM using YES service which sucked, and another call from London, using YES to DPM, who was also using YES. Rather okay type of connection, but worth it because of the call rate.
- The goodies bag, includes a YES Go USB dongle.(FREE!)
- An awesome after party =)

All in all, it was quite awesome. Not much complains from me.

Service

YES 4G offers you 9 sen for either 3 megabyte of data, 1 sms or 1 minute of voice call. It’s really simple and with some really cool rebates rate. I won’t comment much on this, but you can check out the image below for pricing and rebates rate.

Shit happens

Well, can’t blame them but shit happens. On the first night of launch, YES undervalued Malaysian’s anticipation and because of that their website, http://yes.my was down for few hours. The site, which was hosted on their Proactive Network Operating Centre (PNOC) took around 10,000 hit per second and it slowed it’s connection down to almost nothing. And then, the worst happened, a bunch of script kiddies decided to DDoS the site, until it took around 300,000 hit per second that it took the whole thing down for quite sometime. With the help of Hack In The Box (HITB) team, they managed to bring the whole thing up again with speed. There has been a whole bunch of complains on Twitter about the site’s functionality and UI/UX error. Also, YTL Communication’s media team, Carat Media Service which was run by AEGIS media Malaysia, screwed up and mistakenly bought all the keyword of the main competitor and linked it to http://yes.my. They then apologized of this publicly in order to smooth things up.

Future plans

Well, there’s definitely a whole lot of room to improve for YTL and YES 4G. One of the articles I bumped into earlier was one about YTL offering WiMAX enabled Web TV from Sezmi, this will definitely be interesting together with their high speed connection.

Below are the articles that would be awesome for you to read if you want to know more about YTL and YES 4G.

• Yes, No… Maybe? The response to Malaysia’s new ’4G’ network – e27.sg
• YESterday, all my troubles seemed so far away – Dinesh Nair
• YES4G: Initial Impressions – Colin Charles
• This is the unofficial FAQs of #YES4G: || Chapter 1 – Service || Chapter 2 – Pricing & Rebates ||  Chapter 3 – Devices

Popularity: 21% [?]