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.

While there have been wildly successful social media campaigns, (remember Old Spice?), crafting a really good one is still very much a hit-and-miss affair. Some attempted and impromptu campaigns can also backfire horribly (as Ganesh Kumar Bangah of MOL found out), lending damage to a company’s brand reputation instead of enhancing it.

In times like these, a new breed of consultant has emerged — the social media expert. This individual claims to be able to craft a corporation’s social media policy, and assists in getting their brand and products greater recognition and coverage.

Usually armed with funky slide decks full of case studies, they would be quick to show successful social media campaigns which have garnered wide support. What they would fail to mention, however, is that they were not involved in these campaigns, and that the success of any social media campaign is still very much a guessing game. Add that to the fact that the social media phenomenon is only three-years-or-so old, one would question how experts came to be in that short period of time.

And thus, that will pepper the annals of examples of how NOT to do social media.

Companies have long segmented their potential customer base, sliced and diced across many different geographical, social and ethnic attributes. One recent public admission of doing so by a fast moving consumer goods retailer resulted in a backlash no one could have predicted. Played out over many Twitter threads, on Facebook as well as in blog entries, it exposed how the company was selecting bloggers based on their perceived ethnic reach. The hue and cry, as expected, was about racial profiling.

While this is ideally not the right way to profile someone, the chest beaters conveniently forgot that every company does this, either by way of advertisements in different languages or targeting ethnic groups with different features. This does not make it right, but racial and ethnic profiling is a tool all companies have used, and probably will continue to use as long as there are differences among us of the homo sapiens species.

Bloggers too have gotten into the act. It is fairly common for bloggers to be invited for product launches, or given product to review first hand so that they would write about it. Some bloggers are even paid for this service, as it is a way to monetise the current readership of their blogs. However, when you consider that paid advertorials have been in the mainstream press for ages, and it is no secret that public relations companies are made to justify their retainers by column inches delivered, paying or sponsoring a blog to speak well of your product defeats the purpose. Were not blogs chosen because they were seen to be independent, and thus, with a higher credibility due to honesty?

As a result of wanting a piece of this lucrative pie, many bloggers, tweeters and Facebookers now want to be a part of a corporation’s marketing campaigns. Apparently, corporations (or at least the PR agencies they hire) have a list of bloggers and tweeters who they can either use or convince to carry their commercial message. The flip side is, bloggers and tweeters will then want to be on this list of influential social media people in order to derive some benefit from the corporations concerned. Some even go as far as writing to companies and asking for sponsorship, be it in the way of ads or indiscreet payment.

In the Malaysian context, we have long known of bloggers who put forward political arguments for their masters, but the deference to monetary gain is a new trend.

And it is a worrying trend, when these folk are willing to compromise balance and integrity for a pay cheque. An unexpected tweet from someone complaining about being dropped from the list of a fairly large corporation’s ‘most influential‘ list predicates the state of affairs that we have today. While I had put forth the notion that the balance between user generated content and mainstream media will form the landscape of the future, these developments herald the commercialisation of what was once thought to be an independent and alternative space. Whither then true independence?

Mainstream journalists have always held their integrity and credibility as their currency. And many have since paid the price for these high principles. When blogs and, later on, Twitter came along, others thought the everyday man would be more credible, since he is beholden to no one. But if bloggers and tweeters can be bought, and from indications much more cheaply than mainstream media, what becomes of this independent landscape of thought created 41 years ago?

Lost in the sea of money thrown through marketing and PR budgets? Or will the ones who choose to succumb to the call of material gains be balanced by a new cadre of bloggers and Tweeters who uphold the principles of equality, integrity, credibility and balanced opinion.

After all, anything for a piece of the advertising or marketing dollar, right?

The cycle of technology applications and concept is similar to this, like a mobius strip (pictured here). Let’s take a simple analogy, my most favourite example to illustrate this. When computing first started, the architecture was all about big mainframes and simple, dumb terminals for data entry and output. This model went on for a bit, before the introduction of the personal computer pushed some computing to the edge, and thus client-server computing was born in the 1980s where the computing load was shared between the PC and the server.

The we had the web in the early to mid 1990s, with the browser just being a mere display container for the processed data and information from the backend webserver and database server. The model had cycled back to how things were in the days of the mainframe, albeit with much more prettier aesthetics. Soon however, browser and plugin developers brought us Java, JavaScript, Flash and HTML5. All technologies which return some measure of computational processing back to the browser, harking back to the days of client-server computing.

See the cycle repeating itself now, like the fictional Hitler in that Twilight Zone episode ?

Similar cycles exist in our communications technology as well. We’re slowly beginning to see the shift from circuit based services to pure IP based services, which give us the exact same functionality. Recently, I downloaded the WhatsApp Smartphone Messenger, available for iPhones, Blackberries and Symbian devices. It basically, and simply, allows SMS type message sending and receiving. However, instead of using the SMS service transport, it uses an IP connection through your EDGE/3G/WiFi link, thus allowing you to bypass the pay per SMS fees levied by the telcos.

No doubt, the efficacy of this application is only available to anyone who uses it. You would still need to send a regular SMS to someone who does not use the application. However, it signals a shift in how cellular companies should be looking at their mainstay cash cow services. Applications like WhatsApp threaten the revenue stream, pushing celcos into a utility role as mere pipe providers.

With the Skype application becoming more widely available on different smartphone platforms, soon even voice will be taken away from the cellular players, if they do not respond quickly and concisely.

In Whither the celco, I had put forward that the cellular companies are only saved by the incompetence of many of the ISP players. Perhaps now it would be better for them to drop any pretences of being a celco, and realign their considerable resources (and cash hoards !) towards becoming ISPs in their own right. To finally realise that the Netheads have won out over the Bellheads, and to transition into being Netheads themselves. The cycle on this is inevitable, and the faster they realise it, the more secure their future would be.

Increasingly, the internet mass market is moving out of North American and Europe, towards Asia and specifically South East Asia. Already, Malaysia’s Twitter proliferate users has put us in the top 10 globally, for a country with less than stellar internet penetration. It has been our love affair with the mobile phone which has been responsible for this, creating a giant kopi tiam for us to gossip, pass comment and to just basically do what we always do. Its this level of engagement which celcos (and business !) would need to tap into.

And its this kind of interactive engagement which will decide the make or break. Like the recent wildly viral and successful Old Spice campaign, subscribers of data and telecommunications services are no longer mere receivers of the service. They are stakeholders in the network itself, a vibrant and rapidly evolving tribe of dynamic nodes. The economies of scale of recursive retweets, forwards and information dissemination would mean that it would be a narrow-minded business which chooses not to pay some attention towards harnessing this.

And it heralds a cycle back to the 1950s, when technology was custom made and custom built for its users. When the rapidly evolving needs of the market become the driving force to rapid technological development and innovation. When it is the bazaar which decides the technology of the future, instead of the high priests within their cloistered cathedrals. The open source model, played out wide.

But this iteration is not a bad thing at all. Through it, each cycle it makes, we see greater progress and more efficient technology and models being put in, even if on the face it, it looks like old wine in a new bottle. It is however expected, and predictable, leading to a repetition of what sells and what does not.

Like a mobius strip, going along its surface will lead you back to the same spot. Where you started.

‘No way! No needles! I hate needles,’ the patient said.

So the dentist started to hook up the nitrous oxide and once again the bloke objected.
‘I can’t do the gas thing. The thought of having the gas mask on is suffocating me!’

The dentist then asked the patient if he had any objection to taking a pill.
‘No problem,’ the bloke said. ‘I’m fine with pills.’

The dentist said, ‘Here’s a Viagra tablet.’

The bloke gasped, ‘Wow! I didn’t know Viagra worked as a painkiller!’

‘It doesn’t.’ Said the dentist. ‘But it will give you something to hold on to while I extract your tooth.

A diversion, from the main focus. Always serves as a handy tool to get something done while attention is focused elsewhere.

Diversionary tactics has always been a good trick in order to get real work done. Get your detractors thinking of something else, putting their focus and efforts into it while you’re now free to work on the subject at hand without annoying nuisances throwing spanners into the works.

It is a long used tactic, so common that the erstwhile Soviets had a Russian word for it in war and espionage, maskirovka. And it worked, so many times. Give a dog a bone to chase, and you keep him happy while you’re preparing his bath or taking him for shots at the vet.

And its a trick many people use, even if they sometimes do it subconsciously to their friends, family and associates.

And what governments use when they choose to divert the attention of their citizens away from the real problems, towards a manufactured problem. Like the APCO-Israeli link, to avoid questions on delivery of promises. An artificial creation, to allow the void to be filled, thereby drawing attention away from the real void.

It’s what corporations use, when they chose to have you see something else apart from commercial scam they pulling on you. Like the hype Steve Jobs builds around the iPad, to prevent you from seeing what a nonperforming device it actually is.

It is the little gifts your friend or lover gives you, to make you forget the transgressions committed. Or to have you gloss over why you were betrayed, with a sweet apology and some roses.

Every time a parent points out an interesting object to get his child to stop bawling, every time a friend says “Let’s drink up, now who’s getting this round ?” to avoid a drunken argument from escalating, every time Arsene Wenger or Sir Alex Ferguson moan over an injured player, it’s maskirovka.

The art of diversion, a strong tool to have when you play information games on a large scale. PT Barnum notwithstanding, it is sometimes possible to fool all of the people all of the time.

If you do your maskirovka right.

For most people are sheep, and they will believe what they yearn to believe.

C’est l’vie.

First published on April 11, 2010 on Facebook.

But now, Domestic Trade, Cooperatives and Consumerism Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob wants to make sure that if you do use P2P (or torrents as he says specifically), you would be blocked from your ISP. And he’s going to change the Copyright Act to allow that.

One would guess that this would be done through a master black list, kept most likely by MCMC, so you couldn’t sign up for service from another ISP once blocked. Of course, this will not do well for their other plans to have more Malaysians on the broadband trail.

Apparently, music industry revenues have dropped to RM57 million in 2008 from RM315 million in 1997. And quite obviously, the MDs of these companies are not pleased. After all, their year end bonuses and salaries are dependent on them meeting sales quotas. This definitely cannot do !

By demonizing bittorrent though, they are blaming a technology for what people do with it. That would be like making chairs illegal just because someone could throw it and kill someone.

In his myopia, the minister does not see that many companies and open source projects use bittorrent and P2P to distribute software releases. This not only saves the companies bandwidth, but also distributes the load as well as fosters a sense of community spirit around the distribution. People helping each other. Can’t be a bad thing now, can it ?

By spreading the download bandwidth among the downloaders, P2P evens out the network traffic on the internet. In fact, if our ISPs did not throttle or block P2P in Malaysia, they would actually see reduced usage of their expensive international transit links as most P2P protocols would pick a peer which is closer on the network. Download once, share domestically. Isn’t that a noble thought then ?

The benefits of P2P aside, the biggest concern most people are going to have is who will be doing the enforcement, and if there will be any fair trial of sorts ? If the burden is pushed to the ISPs, they may arbitrarily declare P2P usage, and give fair warning. After all, most conveniently use P2P as the reason for volume caps on their service. Do we trust the less than stellar technical competence in the ISPs then, for certainly this competence does not rest in the ministry nor MCMC at the moment.

Both the ministry and the minister fail to see that bittorrent and P2P can instead be put to better use. Flood it with legal content not otherwise available through normal channels. Independent film and music producers and directors have long faced barriers in getting their films to viewers, no thanks to the middlemen and channels which control the distribution chain now. Read: afore mentioned recording and movie companies. Releasing a film to be seeded on bittorrent is one such way of bypassing this control, and it is no wonder the MDs of these companies are worried. They do not want to lose their mojo in deciding what you and I get to see or hear.

Blocking P2P on the network or even banning P2P users from accessing the network is not going to work either. It would be trivially simple for people to utilize servers outside the country to download P2P content, and then hop it back into Malaysia using regular web or FTP connections. This would make the bandwidth asymmetry much worse in addition to making any such ban ineffective. Given the cost of internet access now, this scenario would possibly make it worse.

Reversing content download from outside the country is paramount, and P2P helps in that if used correctly. Banning the technology for what some people do on it is myopic, but instead we need to look at the real reasons why piracy happens and address those. The short and curly of it is that the content is just priced too high and people do not see the value in it. However, by giving viewers a better experience (saw Avatar in 3D didnt you ?), content producers can recover any revenue they may have lost. But innovation is important in achieving this.

One cannot keep shovelling the same drivel and expect the consumer to keep paying more for it. Nor blame a useful technology in order to retain control over a distribution system which has gone stale.

Information wants to be free !

And it did become the device to be seen with, or the device to own.

Even if the tech savvy crowd, the real geeks, panned it to high heaven. While the capacitive touch screen and its form factor was vintage Apple innovation, it was nothing more than an adjunct to the iTunes walled garden which we first saw in the iPhone.

With the only external connectivity being WiFi (a 3G version using micro-sim cards is planned soon) and the inability to plug any external storage, let alone anything with a USB interface, the iPad cloistered you to only what is available on the Internet.

It is this reason why many called it an iPod Touch which wont fit in your pocket, or an oversized iPhone which could not make phone calls. Even the soon to be released 3G version will not support GSM/3G voice, but pure data. Skype or other VoIP software could run over this, but here’s to the perseverance of those trying to run a VoIP conversation over the unreliable 3G connections in Malaysia.

The lack of Flash™ support was Apple’s way of moving away from Adobe’s dominance, with the introduction of HTML5 support in Safari. While some complain about this, moving to HTML5 is better and much more open than relying on Adobe’s proprietary format. YouTube is already trialling HTML5 videos too.

But what really irks is the inconvenience of the on-screen software keyboard. While it’s a full QWERTY and orientates in both landscape and portrait, it requires the iPad be placed on a flat surface or on your lap to be of any serious use for typing anything more than a short tweet or a Facebook status update.

Which is why it is surprising to see Shannon Teoh tout it as the device which has “changed the paradigm of producing data“. Calling it the netbook killer, Teoh goes on to explain how the business of reporting the news has changed with technology and how the iPad would be the one which changes it.

My previous entry, The medium is the mass age, does agree with his views on how the business of mainstream news should and must change. However, while the iPad may play a role in this, it does not signal the death of netbooks, or laptop computers.

All the cons of networked, mobile computing he refers to, “not really mobile, nomadic or at the very best multiplicitous“, are also present in the iPad, for it relies on the same networked infrastructure netbooks, laptops and even mobile phones rely on.

The real issue here lies in a paradigm we have been using for HCI, human computer interface, for over 30 years since Jobs and Gates “borrowed” the idea from Xerox PARC. The WIMP – Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointing Device interface. Even the iPad uses icons, windows (which overlay each other), menus and pointing devices (your finger, duh !). This is no different a paradigm then a netbook with a track pad, or a desktop with an attached mouse.

With its touchscreen and its tablet form factor, the iPad only saves on the split second used in opening a netbook’s screen and displaying the attached keyboard. In fact, one could argue that the ease of mobility and the flexibility of a journalist filing a story from the field could better be gotten from using a Blackberry or a smart phone with a proper QWERTY keyboard like the Nokia E90 or N97. These all-in-one devices also allow you to snap a picture and send it off. I’d think someone using an iPad to take a picture will look quite silly indeed.

The iPad however is a good beginner’s computing device. I can see it being used in homes for web browsing, e-Book reading, news as well as multimedia entertainment. Its good for little Abu to play and get his first touch on, with educational software as well as for grandma to check up on what teenage Lina is saying on her facebook. At the risk of sounding sexist, Mommy could look up her favourite recipes while Daddy would use it for what he likes, surfing porn.

Using the iPad would be a good lead in towards graduation to full fledged computing devices, be it the netbook for light usage or a full fledged powerhouse of a notebook for heavy duty computing. The mix of locally delivered processing and cloud delivered computing would form the right balance.

The iPad has its deserved space in the computing device hall of fame, but it wont be a game changer nor will it signal the death of the netbook and its ilk. That would come from the next generation of smartphones, with the Nokia N900 being a first cut at what could be a future trend. Fully customizable, hackable with open developer APIs and robust enough to be the all in one communications and computing device, these next generation smartphones would kill the netbook.

Even the iPad was foretold in satire, long before it was a gleam in Steve Jobs’ eyes. As the next revolution of user interface makes it initial appearance.

However, the speed in which the internet does this is much faster than any legacy medium, barring voice communications or SMS/MMS. Even so, both SMS and MMS have limitations on the size of messages they can carry, and voice communications does not scale to thousands of people.

The events in Perak over the weekend were one such example. Both the news websites I’m involved in, clearly the top 2 when it comes to organized online news, saw record traffic to their respective websites.

In both cases, it was double their normal traffic patterns. This illuminates the hunger of the man in the street for up to the minute news, augmented by pictures which tell a thousand words. In a blink, the events in Perak were disseminated, minute by minute detail, to the whole nation and the world.

The printed press, just couldn’t keep up with the pace at which the news was being created. And when they finally did print the next morning, many would have called it stale news. And the derision towards the printed news, continues.

My old friend, Asohan, laments Sunday of the loss of an institution. I’m less pessimistic, and have faith that the institution he speaks of will morph into relevance again, provided its leaders have the smarts to recognize its strengths and play to those strengths.

I see the delivery of information, organized news if you will, being a dance between the Daily Me and the Daily Us.

The Daily Me covers the individual tastes and interests each of us have, the different priorities we put on events and issues. This is best served by the internet, with its RSS feeds, countless blogs, news portals with the ability to filter content and provide a personalized view of what is happening.

At the same time, man is a tribal animal, and requires his membership in his tribe. He needs to know if his priorities and interests are in line with other man, and how that differs. Editors in the printed press are faced with limited pages, and by choosing the news they publish, serve as the thermometer of the Daily Us. In essence, the filtering done by news editors serves to remind man that he’s part of a tribe, and that this is what other members of his tribe collectively find important.

And this dichotomy was created by the medium of the internet, and its ability to disseminate information by the speed of light. With this in place, currency of news has been lost to the online media, for they are the only ones who can carry the written word live as it happens, and to correct any mistakes immediately. They’re the ones who can show you what’s happening in Kuala Kangsar, and in doing so, plant the seed of political awareness or activism in your mind. By the time you read about the same event the next day in your rag sheet, its either old news or the fervor has died.

Wither then the printed news ? On the contrary, printed news has to take advantage of the time it has, and present more detailed analysis, different viewpoints, views of experts and stakeholders as well as future directions. They have the benefit of access to the online news, and the advantage of time to provide more in depth coverage of any event.

This provides balance and relevancy, and allows the printed news to claim a new territory to offset the currency lost to online news. Readers get both their Daily Me and their Daily Us the next morning. The one question all people have after they know of an event is, how will this affect me, how will my life change, how will the future pan out ? Printed news is in an unenviable position to provide this perspective.

Asohan ends his piece with, “The loss of the newspaper is nothing to celebrate. It would be the passing of an institution that has served too important a role in society.”.

I don’t see it as a loss of an institution. Humanity didn’t mourn the demise of papyrus or stone tablets. Its the loss of a medium, that of the dead trees. And that has been replaced by a new medium, that of sand and glass, silicon and fiber.

The institution remains, with its time tested traditions and practices. Only its channel changes, to one which has a wider reach.

Change, or be changed.

First published on February 8, 2009 on Facebook.

You could send a tweet, or a mass SMS using the same analogy, to everyone who follows you or you could target your tweets to smaller groups of individuals. At the same time you would be able to get feeds from the people you follow, and participate in those conversations.

Due to its simple nature, it is perfectly suited for mobile usage, as people send little snippets of their lives into the ether. Some are interesting, some are funny. Most are banal. But that is not the point.

Its the internetification of traditional mobile telecommunications services which is happening here. Slowly, we are beginning to see that more and more services which we enjoyed on circuit switched networks, fixed line or mobile, are becoming purely IP based. Sometimes with a one for one replacement as we see with Twitter or Skype and VoIP for voice. One to one SMSes have long been replaced by Blackberry Messenger or mobile IM clients for Yahoo!, GTalk, MSN Live and AIM.

Bit by bit, the exclusive domain of the Bellheads are being taken over by the Netheads. Telcos and celcos are finding it hard coming to grasp with a world which only requires a data pipe from them, with value added services coming from the most innovative companies on the internet.

Some try to cope with a walled garden, but many have learnt the folly of doing that. With over 5 million Facebook users in Malaysia, and an estimation of about 900,000 Twitter users, Malaysians are fast taking to IP as a replacement for traditional telecommunications services. It is more common to see people making plans for after work engagements on Twitter and Facebook than it would perhaps be on voice or SMS.

The death knell has been sounded, unless celcos revamp quickly and bridge these legacy services to the growing dominion of IP-based communications. This is the reason why all the local mobile players are quickly trying to position themselves as mobile broadband players. The writing is on the wall, and none want to miss out on this. With the impending introduction of LTE into the Malaysian airwaves, this will be taken up a notch further.

The notion of an IP-only world has long been forecast, but it has been resistance from the traditional players and the less than stellar data service they provide which has been a stumbling block. Consumers however have become more discerning, and now place data service quality as a primary factor in deciding which celco they sign up with. For a lot of them, voice is hardly a service they use anymore, replaced by tweeting, SMSing and writing updates and checking up on others on Facebook. It’s Generation Z at work, and boy do they have a vengance.

Does this signal the demise of traditional telcos and celcos ? Not by a long shot. Their survival is more or less assured because the new players, the pure IP and internet service providers, do not seem to understand how to capitalize on their edge. They have been playing into the hands of these legacy players, allowing them the time to catch up and throw hoards of stashed cash to come from behind.

Even with TMNet and Packet One, we still see more broadband access coming from mobile subscribers of Celcom, Maxis and Digi instead of the pure ISP plays. Pretty soon, as mobile data access speeds catch up (and quality is assured !), it will not make a difference if you are accessing the internet at home from a traditional ISP or a celco’s mobile broadband plan. The Negroponte switch in effect.

WiMAX hyped a good competitor to mobile broadband, promising dual home and mobile usage. However, the lackadasical attitude of the providers have made WiMAX nothing more than alternatives for DSL and FTTH services. The much promised mobility and service differentiation never actually happened, inspite of marketing messages to the contrary.

So, don’t sell your stock in your favourite mobile provider just about yet. I think they would be around for a while, unless the ISPs buck up and take competition up a notch instead of going for the same crowded market and services.

The continued growth of smartphones, as Apple, Google and Nokia battle it out, means that this will be a fat sector to milk, and the ones who can leverage off the best that IP can give, will win the service provider races.

The dinosaurs are going to be around for a while, folks.

As expected, there was an outcry from Unifi users (all 1,700 of them) about this possible invasion of privacy. While TM must be commended for responding quickly to this with a solution which seems fair, it highlights the lack of care when it comes to security by service providers.

It is highly irresponsible to deploy edge and access networking equipment in a customer premise, with a direct connection to their internal LANs, and allow this backdoor to exist. Especially since the authentication credentials are default across all installations and easy to guess.

Remote access definitely simplifies remote management and maintenance, but this flexibility must be limited by secure policies which protects both the Unifi network and the customer’s data infrastructure.

However, this policy of having a second super administrator account which is hidden from users is not exclusive to TMNet alone. Packet One does the same thing for the CPE WiMAX modems they deploy in homes and offices too.

In my private email correspondence with them, I’ve asked for this access to be given to me. Their initial response was to stall and refuse, but after mutiple complaints about their service quality (or lack thereof !), they finally relented and instead created a specialized access profile for me. However, this in no way is as complete and comprehensive as the super administrator access which they have refused to give up.

One wonders of the real reasons why they keep this hidden from users, and their refusal to allow users access into a device which sits on a private LAN infrastructure. Does Packet One also claim this for maintenance reasons ? If so, why not use monitoring solutions which are SNMP or agent based instead of directly logging in ? Isnt the very existence of this super administrator account a security loophole, both from personnel within Packet One and anyone else ?

For the record, this super administrator access is possible with some rudimentary technical manipulation of the boot process of the CPE WiMAX modem by technically savvy individuals, so in essence it really doesnt do much to prevent ordinary users from getting to it.

Perhaps it would do Packet One some good to take a leaf out of TMNet’s handling of this issue and come clean, before this situation blows up into a full fledged security incident.

Dare we hold our breath in waiting for them to respond ?

This has allowed individual and independent media and publishing to flourish, and while some have done so well they’re now mainstream in their own right, others cater to a smaller but just as interested niche. YouTube and blogs have extended exponentially the ability of people to put content up there for a message that needs to be sent.

That same thinking and the need to promote independent Malaysian content led two people, James Chong and Pete Teo, to initiate the 15Malaysia Project (http://www.15malaysia.com/). Perhaps it would be better to let James explain it more eloquently in his own words here, http://bit.ly/fI42T.

Pete, James and I got into a robust discussion yesterday, however, on the merits of hosting the 15 films (they’re all excellent, but I liked Rojak the best !) on a US-based server. And while trading banter with Pete, I realised that a lot of people assume that the Internet is symmetrical in its bandwidth economy, and do not understand the imbalance of it all.

We are all familiar with the notion that ISPs would provide DSL or WiMax links with a higher download bandwidth than an upload bandwidth, while bandwidth provided to individual servers in data centres are usually symmetrically the same for uploads and downloads. This asymmetrical nature of your last mile bandwidth is based on the notion that people would be vastly consuming more content than they would be serving from their accounts. And more often than not, this modelling is adequate.

Now, take that single DSL/WiMAX asymmetrical bandwidth model, and multiply it by millions of users nationwide across many different ISPs and service providers, and we would have a tendency of downloading more international content (thus more download bandwidth) than we do of producing content (through upload bandwidth). This is known as the international bandwidth asymmetry which most countries in the world face. Notable exceptions are the US (where most English content is located) and China, Japan and Korea which has its own content due to language reasons.

The bandwidth asymmetry is important because it has a significant cost factor, for our ISPs (be they TM, Celcom, P1, Maxis, Digi or any others) have to purchase download bandwidth at a higher cost than upload bandwidth. In other words, when the ISPs decide to peer with another ISP in the US for example, they would be sending us more data than we would be sending them, thus creating an imbalance and higher cost which eventually gets passed down to the user thru monthly fees or bandwidth caps. Plus, it puts our ISPs at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to making peering arrangements to pass traffic across the internet. Since the mantra of content is king has taken root, we need them more than they need us now.

As such, it is always much better (from a longer term perspective) to host as much content locally and to have it downloaded by viewers and users outside the country. The more compelling content we have, the more the downloads, and we can take one step closer towards closing the chasm of bandwidth imbalance. Of course, by hosting content locally and closer to the viewer, it does make for reduced latency which translates into smoother video playback and faster web site loading.

So, back to what Pete and I were talking about, I thought that with the 15Malaysia project, there was a golden opportunity to have some quality and compelling video content hosted in Malaysia, to be viewed globally as well as locally and take that first step towards reducing the bandwidth imbalance. With P1 hopping on board as a sponsor, it would seem obvious that the ISP would be also be involved in hosting the content. Local hosting would have meant that for the majority of viewers, international bandwidth wouldn’t be required, and for the rest of viewers outside the country, we would be going a step towards “exporting” some content and reducing the bandwidth asymmetry.

However, as Pete and James have explained, the content is hosted in the US and UK [1] (though the domain resolves to a US allocated IP address) at the main www.15malaysia.com [2] site, while there is a locally hosted (HD even !) copy at www.ruumz/15malaysia. However, the problem with this is that a vast majority of users used the main www.15malaysia.com site as that was used to extensively promote the project and the films. Ironically, a large majority of viewers would be from Malaysia, utilizing our international links to download/stream the videos, which were original Malaysian content.

I would instead have preferred the primary www.15malaysia.com site to be hosted in Malaysia (on P1′s networks even, to leverage off the branding from the sponsorship), with backups and mirrors in the US/UK for both redundancy and performance. This would be logical, given that a majority of viewers were based in Malaysia, thus not requiring the use of the more costlier international links to view the videos. Achieving a geographically balanced cluster of multiple servers like this was as simple as using DNS to return different server IP addresses depending on the viewers geographic location.

Why this was not done isn’t clear, but nevertheless it is the loss of a unique and golden opportunity. Especially as since Pete has indicated that some of the films have won awards and acclaim in Europe and globally, leading to an increased international audience interested in downloading content from Malaysia. The more compelling the content, the more the downloads, and the faster we can reduce the bandwidth asymmetry.

And the faster we can reduce the asymmetry, the cheaper our internet access can be and perhaps one day signal the end of bandwidth caps imposed by the ISPs.

[1] Pete has further clarified and explained that all new releases of films were hosted only in MY, while older firms were balanced between local and externally hosted servers. That would explain the observation I’m seeing of the CDN returning non-MY IP addresses.

[2] Technically, they are using a CDN (content delivery network) aggregator to deliver the actual videos, in addition to YouTube streaming. The aggregator doesn’t always return a Malaysian IP address though.

First published on January 30, 2010 on Facebook.