NOV 22 — YES, it’s finally here! (pun intended). 

The long-awaited arrival of Malaysia’s latest wireless service provider landed on our shores when YTL Communications (YTL Comms) officially launched its WiMax service dubbed YES on November 19.

The media got a glimpse of what YTL Comms had to offer a couple of hours earlier at a press briefing, in itself packed by ordinary standards. There Tan Sri Francis Yeoh, executive chairman of YTL Comms, once again articulated his vision of what he believes is the communication company of the future.

“Smartphones should be run on smart networks and not run on dumb networks,” he said in his keynote address, alluding to the fact the YES network was a smart one as opposed to dumb networks run by competing service providers currently based on legacy systems.

With that stage set, Wing K. Lee, CEO of YTL Comms, took the stage to espouse the virtues of the new YES network, which he claimed would offer its users both performance and value.

Lee noted that YTL Comms has set up 1,500 base stations that will allegedly cover about 65 per cent of the country, with some 1,000 more to be rolled out, taking the coverage to 80 per cent of the country sometime next year.

He spoke of bringing the best converged devices to accompany the coverage that it provides to consumers. These devices comprise dongles, a WiMax phone (YES Buzz), routers and a Wi-Fi sharing device. Bundled together with these hardware offerings is an integrated communications software called YES Life, which enables its user to communicate with others and has calendaring and address book functions.

Lee then went on to espouse the simplicity of YES’s charges: nine sen per call minute, per SMS sent, and per three megabytes of data usage. There is also a tiered structure, which gives you rebates of up to 30 per cent back when a subscriber uses 4GB of data. Lastly, he claimed that the speed that YES can serve customers is three to five times faster than what is available today in the market.

Stripping away all the fanfare, fancy launch gambits and glitzy marketing speak, one must give credit to YTL Comms where it’s due. Providing a comprehensive set of devices via its full set of hardware devices and an integrated software platform in the form of YES Life is a good point to start. 

Rolling out the network up to achieve 65 per cent coverage — albeit having delayed its launch several times and being fined in the process — is also a commendable effort, as is trying to ramp up to 80 per cent coverage by next year.

That said, it’s with trepidation that I note several points that could still make potential customers take a wait and see approach and, thus, derail YES’s take up.

The first is YTL Comms’ proposition to persuade would-be subscribers to immediately abandon today’s 3G dumb networks in favour of YES’s 4G smart network. Given the fact that YES is only 65 per cent nationwide today, it’s extremely unlikely that subscribers would depend on a YES Buzz mobile phone as their primary communication device. 

Keeping in mind that its voice capability runs via packet data, much like how Skype uses the Internet to connect to other callers, a subscriber’s connectivity is only as good the availability of the YES WiMax coverage. In the case of current 3G dumb networks, voice can still be transmitted over an overlay of GSM coverage should 3G coverage for data become unavailable.

Then there is the issue of whether coverage is comprehensive enough to extend to those in high-rise buildings as well as those in residential and commercial lots where there is a lot of building clutter or foliage blockages. 

Case in point: A test conducted by Low Yat.Net’s team on the 13th floor of its offices in MidValley yielded poor coverage so much so that its tester had to go downstairs to try and hunt for the signal.

As such, subscribers will likely only consider YES at the present time as a secondary phone or mobile data line. In doing so, subscribers would not gain from any cost savings as they would still need to support two different phone/data accounts.

I guess one could say this is one area where the dumb network trumps YES’s smart network.

Secondly, because YES’s pay-as-you-go model and rebates start from 2.5GB of usage and gradually increase to a maximum of 30 per cent money back only after 4GB of usage, the YES plans seem to favour those who use less than 5GB per month. This means that those shopping for unlimited download packages need not apply for YES’s service.

Thirdly, 3-5 times faster than 3G speeds claimed by YES, while seemingly impressive, means that users are supposed to receive between 4.5Mbps and 7.5Mbps assuming an average download speed of 1.5Mbps experienced currently by 3G users. But according to some who have tried YES, the realistic speeds hover only around 4-6 Mbps. 

This is not bad for starters but bear in mind that any wireless service will always suffer from environmental variations such as building clutter, radio wave reflections and even foliage blockages, which will ultimately affect speed and reliability. 

Couple this with congestion that is bound to be faced by YES as subscriber numbers ramp up, the speed could very well degrade as time goes by, something that no service provider is impervious to.

To round up the challenges, YTL Comms has to ensure that service provisioning is spot on, its customer service centre will be able to attend to customer enquiries and answer all questions regarding YES, and address problems to do with network rollout and ongoing service challenges.

But, unfortunately, this is what YES hasn’t been doing well. As of the posting of this column, YES faced a barrage of complaints on blogs, forums, and Twitter. To make matters worse, there has even been a “Say No to YES” Facebook page set up since then.

Some of the complaints include how its main website (www.yes.my) was down for a good 18-20 hours after the launch; how the website when, finally fixed, was slow; how potential customers were not getting enough forthcoming responses because there isn’t any call centre to call in to; and how the website is not well laid out causing consumers difficulty in accessing information. And I suspect there are more woes at hand for YES.

In its defence, though, YTL Comms issued a statement stating that, “On top of legitimate customer traffic, www.yes.my had also experienced a series of hostile attacks, as many as 300,000 hits a second. As a result, we had to take tedious steps of filtering individual blocks of IP addresses to stop the malicious attacks, and have taken measured steps to restore the service level of our portal.” 

While these so-called “hostile attacks” may be unfortunate and while it’s reasonable to expect some form of teething problems from a new network, the plain truth is that starting a new network from scratch is not as easy as simply creating a lot of pre-launch hype on traditional and social media.

Nor is it merely about claiming that there is no legacy technology to hold YES back or claiming to offer better all-round value to trump the competition.

Often hype precedes reality in a marketing campaign but given the fact that netizens have experienced a bowlful of shortcomings from other operators in the past, what the nation wants is simply for service providers to come to the table with products and services that will turn out as advertised — minus the hype. 

As I’ve written before, the jury is still out on whether YES will be accepted as a credible competitor to the legacy dumb network players. That said, I believe the nation would all like YES to succeed because more competition can only be better for consumers. 

But if the beginning of YES is any indication, YES will have its work cut out for it and will have a long way to go before being able to rival its competitors, whom I might add, have painfully suffered through many years and difficulties and complaints in building their respective networks. 

This is the cruel reality of the wireless business and learn fast is what YTL Comms must do instead of focussing on the hype of the moment.

If not, YES will risk being sidelined not only by the competition but also by consumers, and go the way of the dodo.

* The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist.