YESterday, all my troubles seemed so far away

What a weekend it has been, for sure !

The digerati of Malaysia, and the world, were ready for the much delayed launch (over 2 years !) of YES, YTL Communications’ entry into the broadband space after being granted a license to operate a WiMAX network by MCMC.

Fueled by months of pre-launch publicity, a series of human story TVCs and a pre-launch event with some selected bloggers. It all came to be that on 6pm of November 19th, 2010, YES went live for everyone at the launch held at the JW Marriot, Kuala Lumpur attended by over 1,000 people. Colin Charles has a good writeup of the launch and an overview of everything, and was with us for the ensuing events.

A small group of us from Hack In The Box were also honoured enough to be invited to the launch event. Ambling in though, the ballroom was packed to the brim, with standing room only. Does bode well that all the pre-launch publicity managed to get people interested in the hype around it.

Picking up a Huddle MiFI device each, we made our way for some chilled amber liquid to test the devices out. The line at the counter was way too packed to register for an account yet, and the YES online registration website was still down, awaiting the official launch. Eagerly watching the countdown timer on the website, all four of us (L33tdawg, biatch0, RuFI0 and me), whipped out the Huddle Mifi, hooked it to our notebooks, and tried connecting.

First impressions were that any web access from the browser redirects you to the YES website for registration and activation. All of us immediately noticed though that our Twitter clients (I use  Echofon) was receiving tweets though and our instant messaging clients were connecting to the respective IM networks. The resulting smile on all our faces must have made our neighbours at Shook! think we were slightly insane. After that it was a race to see who could whip out an SSH client first and create a VPN tunnel to any one of our servers on the internet. And barely seconds later, all of us had full blown internet access on the YES network without even using a working account.

YES, you read that right. We had full blown internet access over the YES network without needing a proper account, based on the default settings on the device. “Free internets, FTW !” was the tweet which we sent out immediately and retweeted by a bunch of other folk.

While caught up in the elation of discovering this loophole, barely 10 minutes after the official launch, we were quite oblivious that thousands of eager beavers had been waiting for the launch online, and none of them could access the YES website it seems. The YES website was deader than a dodo. Browser time outs, even if you managed to get the first bit of HTML were common.

And that was the start of the erosion of the excitement around YES’s launch. The problems kept piling on, from YES Go dongles with corrupted images of the driver to a grave mistake by their advertising/media agency in hijacking competitor brand names on Google Adwords. Twitter was awash with mostly complaints of people being unable to sign on to the WiMAX network, of zero responsiveness on the YES website with varied reports on downloadable bandwidth. Some were getting less than promised speeds, in the 1Mbps to 2Mbps range while others were hitting 8Mbps to 11Mbps in some areas.

Add this to some of the earlier heat they had taken over using the monicker 4G, when the ITU had clarified that only WiMAX 2 (IEEE 802.16m) and LTE-Advanced can be called 4G. In addition, WiMAX as both YES and P1 implement it is IEEE 802.16e, which is technically part of the 3G IMT-2000 specifications. 4G is thus just used as a marketing term for now, and has the effect of causing consumer confusion when real 4G rolls out. A dinner discussion yesterday evening with Ron Resnick, Chairman of the WiMAX Forum, indicates that he too agrees 4G is for now just a marketing term. How this plays out in the long run, remains to be seen.

Back to YES, it was only 72 hours after the launch though that most of the problems they had in the website and WiMAX network (which to indications went off the air for a while from Saturday afternoon) were ironed out, and the chasm had been crossed. Indications started coming in of people enjoying good speeds, and I managed to clock a sustained 11Mbps download for 15 minutes in PJ yesterday night. However so, most indications of the packet latency and jitter on the network is weak with ping times approaching 180ms and jitter of 40ms to MyIX. While it is to be expected from mobile wireless technology, it does raise questions on the quality of YES’s voice offering, as that is inherently VoIP.

From a security angle, other than the authentication bypass loophole we had discovered Friday evening, reports from many subscribers started pouring in of YES sending emails with unencrypted cleartext passwords to then. As anyone who has run a web registration system knows, this is considered bad form from a security angle and there are many well known and oft-used methods to have users informed of their passwords, activate their accounts or reset forgotten passwords. YES should ideally adopt one of these methods in the longer run.

Interestingly, in The Business Times, YES had indicated they suffered a DDoS attack on their website, clocking over 300,000 hits per second and that was the reason for its instability. While we did sit and discuss this issue with YES people at their NOC on Saturday and did assist in some measure of a fix for the website related issues and we really cannot say much about what was discussed, none of the public threat boards nor botnets were aware of a DDoS wave against YES. Thus, the reason behind the website instability will join the annals of unknown secrets like the story behind the John F. Kennedy assasination.

At time of publishing, a lot of the prior problems have been ironed out and people are beginning to get some real usage out of the YES network. To prove a point, this blog entry itself was typed out on the YES network, using the YES Go dongle from The George and Dragon, Bangsar Shopping Complex, which seems to be on the envelope edge of YES coverage with 1 bar signal, RSSI = -82 , CINR = 9 and ping times to Jaring of 500ms and MyIX at 300ms.

In summary, I do agree with Edwin Yapp though, that if they had not gone on so much hype preceding the launch, the fallout from this fiasco would not have been so bad for YTL Communications. While this is a baptism of fire for them, one hopes they have learnt from this horrible episode to now improve on their service in the future. RM2.5 billion in expenditure has to have done some good, now !

Till then, a dedication to the folks at YTL Communications as they work hard on getting things fixed, here is Beatles’ Yesterday.