Some of you readers might have noticed that we were previously featured on NTV7’s The Breakfast Show. We finally managed to get a copy of the clip, and here it is. Make sure to add it to your favourites on YouTube, or leave a comment!

According to this story on The Star - TM, ASPs in Pricing Tiff,a pro-tem association of ASPs called the Communications & Multimedia Assocation claim that TM is implementing a strategy that is unfair and anticompetitive to its members. For your information,� ASPs provide their customers with computer- based services delivered via networks provided by carriers like TM. These services include hosted application software and Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) communications, among others.

The association claims that TM is conducting unfair business practices, stifling competition through monopoly, and breaking Malaysian laws.

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Some of you have been asking how you can contribute further to the development of RedesignMalaysia.com, and further ways to improve broadband in Malaysia.

I’m not sure how many of you are aware, but the web development, design, content, planning, media relations and marketing (basically everything) behind RedesignMalaysia.com is fully sponsored by Josh Lim & Associates, including our full time staff, contract workers, and volunteers. Altogether, it has proven to be quite a mammoth effort, taking up more than 1500 man-hours and counting.

Our position as a web design and marketing company puts us in a good place to run the website - seeing that we have a history of putting sites together, and publicizing them. However, RedesignMalaysia.com is our own company grown initiative, and wasn’t commissioned by any client, hence its kind of different (ie, also costly).

The start of the year has brought us quite a bit of projects, and we’ll like to have more people involved, ideally, people with some time to spare. We are looking for people to fill fulltime positions mainly, however we are also open to contract workers and volunteers. Why its going to be fun, in one sentence: We do a whole range of exciting client projects, including RedesignMalaysia.com - and we’re also planning to launch a few Web 2.0 services this year to do with blogs, Malaysia, advertising and community.

Our clients include companies such as CIMB, Proton Berhad, Pernod Ricard Malaysia, Manhattan Fish Market and more! Other than that we also work together with our technology/advertising partners on projects for various telcos and organizations.

So, this is what we’re looking for:

1. Do you know Wordpress/Joomla/PHP/CSS/AJAX/HTML and more? We need web developers & web designers.
2. We need more hardcore Adobe Flash Actionscript/XML developers. I know there are more than 6 of you existing in Malaysia, why are they so hard to find?
3. Are you a good illustrator/animator/video editor? We’re also looking to populate this site and others with some cool illustrations and motion graphics. We’ll also like to come up with a RedesignMalaysia.com infomercial to put on Youtube.
4. Is your England very the powderful? We need writers and researchers.
5. We would also like to know if anyone here can volunteer legal assistance, for us to research the implications on things such as contracts, consumer rights and the National Broadband Plan.
6. And of course, client servicing people, project managers & strategists are required to keep it all from getting too crazy.

Your boss and comrade would be a relatively okay dude, which has been on Fear Factor Malaysia, hijacked a RM30 million dollar ad campaign, speaks at seminars to everyone from students to government officials, used to be a theatre actor (Dataran Merdeka Actor’s studio, before it got flooded), and has been designing web sites for over 9 years. You’ll also be working with other people who have won student short film awards, composed music for Malaysian hip hop artistes, and modelling around the world (did you know he’s also very good at numbers?). Your office environment will have free junk food, designer furniture, indie rock/pop music, and a trendy 1600 sq. ft. SoHo ambience.

Send your resume to info@redesignmalaysia.com or josh.lim@josh.com.my. Even if you don’t think you fit the bill, you can still help - tell a friend or link to this post using the banner image. Don’t know a lot, but willing to work hard and learn? We also take interns (so far we’re had interns from MMU, Universiti Malaya, University Putra Malaysia & The One Academy). Thanks!

Check out RedesignMalaysia on Del.icio.us. Got a link you’ll like to share with us? Add us to your network, and you can share broadband news and useful resources for us to post up here and share to even more people. Also, do make sure to bookmark us too!

Based on the description of this product on the Green Packet website, the SONmetro 212A Subscriber Unit, and my conversations with one anonymous reseller, it’s possible that Green Packet might launch 3MBps consumer wireless broadband packages this year. The technology looks very interesting in theory - seems to be mostly immune to line of sight or signal strength/velocity issues. Read this excerpts: “receiving data from tens of different neighbors from different locations per second while driving”, “one can still communicate over 1.5Mbps while traveling at speed up to 300 km/hour“.

So, in theory, you could be downloading some data pretty quickly, and driving above 3 times the local highway limit at the same time. Wow!

As a marketing person and occasional Ah Beng, I imagine a great publicity stunt they could use to launch the service, involving a professional driver, a sports car, some drifting, a series of internal cameras (one pointed at the laptop, more mounted on the car roof and hood), a heavily strapped in laptop user in the back seat, and a nice, empty stretch of road and a live broadcast.

To Green Packet readers (and particularly to Michael Lai): If you use the idea, be sure to give us credit (and we take cash too, haha.) Oh, and I wouldn’t mind being the strapped in laptop user even, if you get both a really good driver and my blood type on file as well…

According to a very reliable source, we got to know the following about the current P2P blocking issue facing Streamyx users:

- TMNet is currently in the process of testing their “Volume-Base system”
- As its still in the development phase, the call center won’t be able to tell you much.
- The block is implemented from 6AM - Midnight.
- The P2P block was implemented after the Taiwan earthquake because they noticed that “p2p downloading was adding to performance degradation on their network”
- “Weather permitting”, the block will be lifted at the end of January, when the Taiwan circuit is fully restored

Based on the above information, and bandwidth usage starting to show up on bills, we speculate that TMNet will release new packages to cater for heavy broadband users. To be fair, this should result in cheaper packages for light users - and not more expensive packages for heavy broadband users, presumably. As for the throttling, well - let’s hope its really lifted when the Taiwan circuit is restored, and maybe too, it’ll all get settled in the next two days.

Malaysians are “text maniacs”, say today’s Malay Mail. Apparently, 21 million of us cell phone users, send out 84 million text messages out daily. And assuming each SMS costs 10 sen, Malaysians are spending about RM8.4 million a day! And this is without factoring in premium sms at all.
How much do Malaysians pay for broadband per day? Yes, we know you are billed monthly. Let’s calculate just how much TMNet Streamyx subscribers spend, since they have the vast majority of market share.The last verified number of Streamyx subscribers was 732,000, according to TM’s news release. Let’s try some very conservative estimates. The lowest package for Streamyx is RM20 (Basic 384Kfor 10 hours), and the highest is RM1188 (2MBps Corporate). The bulk of users would presumably be the RM77 and RM88 ones.

Hence:

Per month: RM77.00 x 732,000 = RM56,364,000.00 = RM56 million
Per day:RM56,364,000.00 divided by 30 days (1 month) = RM1,878,800.00 = RM1.87 million
Per Year: RM676,368,000.00 = RM 676 million.

732,000 TMNet subscribers pay TM Net a total of RM 1.87 million a day collectively.

Its quite obvious that TMNet is doing well. Last year, in September 2006, the Internet & Multimedia division of TM (presumably TMNet), recorded a profit of RM626 million.

Readers: How much do you think TMNet spends on marketing…and how much do you think they spend upgrading their services? Does anyone here have access to any figures?

Please also feel free to correct my math or assumptions if you think they are erroneous.

This is for all the users of P2P & Bittorrent using TMNet Streamyx. Yes, your P2P traffic is being blocked and throttled.

Whether eDonkey, BearShare, iMesh, SoulSeek, eMule, Kazaa, Kazaa Lite, Shareaza, Napster, Limewire, Azereus, Bitcomet, uTorrent, BitSpirit, BitConjurer, BitTornado…or even those using Skype or the iTunes music store (yes, that too is being blocked).

Make yourself heard. Banners for now. An action plan soon. Freedom to use our promised “unlimited” connections, hopefully soon.

Update: Thanks to forum user AZ10 on Cari.com.my, we have a Chinese translation of the above!

这是为P2P & Bittorrent 的所有用户使用TMNet Streamyx 。是, 您的P2P 交通被阻拦和被节流。是否eDonkey 、BearShare, iMesh, SoulSeek, eMule, Kazaa 、Kazaa Lite,Shareaza 、Napster 、Limewire 、Azereus, Bitcomet, uTorrent, BitSpirit、BitConjurer, BitTornado… 甚至那些使用Skype 或iTunes 音乐商店(是, 太被阻拦) 。做自己听见。横幅暂时。行动计划很快。自由使用我们的被许诺的”� 限的” 连接, 有希望地很快。

Bonus: (Lost in translation type humour) If you use Google’s automatic Chinese > English translator, the posting which was originally meant to say “For those that don’t understand English, read the Chinese version” gets mangled into “Chinese people do not understand the purpose of English”. Well, I’m a Chinese myself, but I’ve always found English pretty useful…