Hello. This starts off as a “summary type post” written inspired by the following article on BusinessWeek. The article : Ten Stories that Defined Broadband in 2008 actually talks about broadband globally (with a definite US slant), and I recommend you read it before reading my comments below - which are relevant to Malaysia.

And then later on, it’s followed by a summary of some hopes for 2009, some random comments, and further developments for RedesignMalaysia.com in 2009.

1. Optical cable cuts bookmark the year

A total of three cables went out throughout the year 2008, but thankfully, internet access here wasn’t quite as badly affected as it was last time when the Taiwan earthquake affected our connection locally. As this time, it was only if you were surfing a website that was hosted in Europe or countries close to it that you would be affected.

Details on what happened here at MalaysianWireless

2. Peering Troubles Disrupt the Internet

Probably irrelevant to most Malaysians, as it is mainly a US issue between Cogent, Telia & Sprint.

3. The unwelcome rise of metered broadband.

In the time to come, it looks like local ISPs such as Streamyx will continue throttling P2P downloads. So much for “unlimited broadband”. It’s easy to market something as “unlimited”, and while most of this may be fine and unnoticed for newbie users, those that have legitimate needs for things such as video streaming, P2P and online gaming will definitely feel that they are getting shortchanged.

It remains to be seen if TM Streamyx will either:

a) provide true “unlimited” access to all
b) admit in a way that “unlimited” was a misleading term, and start offering uncapped packages at different price levels.
c) continue exactly as the way it is

Option A is unlikely, Option B is possible (but will look bad for them), and Option C unfortunately, is the most likely.

If you’re interested to see what other local ISPs to do cope with P2P traffic, read more here.

4. Wireless Broadband Takes Wings, Thanks To The iPhone 3G

There is an astounding amount of Malaysians with iPhones (well, at least among my friends). Considering that its not officially launched here, and neither do Maxis, Digi or Celcom support it officially, its quite interesting that people here have taken the trouble to crack the phone and get it to work. You cannot get an iPhone from the local Apple store - the only way is to buy it from overseas, or get it from a grey market retailer.

But anyway, the topic here is basically surfing on mobile. Local mobile wireless surfing is rapidly growing due to devices such as the iPhone, and smart phones. Which brings us to the likely conclusion of what we may see more of soon: Phone + Laptop + Internet Access packages. This is a good thing, provided that the package actually makes things cost less rather than more.

5. Planet Broadband

There are now 400 million broadband users in the planet. Malaysia still lags behind in terms of speed, price and availability. Meanwhile, Singapore which is like, 50 times smaller than Malaysia can offer broadband packages of 100 Mbps and in the United Kingdom, there are 50Mbps connections available.

Meanwhile, in Malaysia, we’re stuck with an average of 1-2, with a upper limit of 5-10 Mbps which tend to be for expensive corporate packages. There’s a rumour going around that Google wanted to host a datacenter in Malaysia, however, there is insufficient bandwidth available for their needs.

6. Outages become commonplace

In 2008, even Google, Yahoo and Amazon went down due to increased load. Malaysians will find its nothing new as we frequently are unable to access all kinds of websites on a regular basis, though, not due to problems on the part of the websites themself - rather, our connection to the internet.

7. Clearwire and the divergent fortunes of Wimax

Wimax wise in Malaysia, P1 (Packet One) Wimax is gaining some ground, together with the unfortunately obcure AsiaSpace Amax (which seems to cover only select parts in Klang Valley). YTL has missed the deadline in implementing Wimax, while Redtone has launched corporate broadband services in Sabah. More news here.

8. Troubles Return To Telecom Land

In the US, the banking, automotive, property and telecoms industry were affected by the credit crunch. Locally though, we have a dubious situation: Not many companies are affected, simply because there aren’t that many companies and choices around.

9. Good-bye, Mr Martin

While this references an FCC chairman who is largely responsible for US Telecommunication related items, it’ll be interesting to see how Barack Obama’s new team and new FCC leader will affect connectivity in the US and consequently, the world. Malaysia is very much dependent on international connectivity as well - eg, most of us use MSN Messenger, and use Google for search, etc.

Conclusion & Other News

Mobile Number Portability was probably one of the bigger things to happen in 2008 for the local telecommunications industry, and definitely shook things up. Both Digi and Celcom seem to be benefiting from this so far.

Btw, there’s now a new mobile operator apparently! If you like the novelty of having your number start with 010 (eg 010-3456789), check out XOX or news here. And if you find the service sucks, you can always keep the number, and switch operator.

Let’s hope 2009 is a better year for broadband in Malaysia! Hopefully the competitiveness happening with Mobile Number Portability in the telco field will spill over into broadband, or result in some smart “joint packages” of sorts. For example, an incentive for telcos to keep their customers from switching: Offer a broadband + mobile service package to make it cheaper/more convenient overall for customers to stay with them.

If you’re wondering what I use personally, and my thoughts on it as a consumer (it may help you make a decision if you have similiar usage patterns): If you’re planning to use a mobile broadband package: DON’T USE MAXIS BROADBAND. I did, and it was terrible. Slower than dialup although they told me my area was covered. I’m still using them for my mobile service, however that may change. There were quite a bit of dropped calls in November 2008, as well as recently, I find that SMSes need to be recent.

The BlackBerry Bold promotion for Celcom is quite tempting (switch your line to Celcom, get a free Blackberry Bold if you use above RM500 a month), though I wonder if their mobile coverage is decent (I used to have quite a bit of issues reaching people on Celcom numbers - including one of the children of someone in upper Celcom management!). I’m still using Streamyx at home/work, and its been mostly reliable in my area (Aman Suria/Dataran Prima/Tropicana/Kelana Jaya). However I’ll probably be considering the following options for broadband too: P1 (as soon as they launch in my area), or Digi or Celcom (depending if I get the Bold).

Meantime, in 2009 I resolve to update this blog more often. Hopefully even a few times a week, however most likely shorter, “breaking news” type articles. We’re still the number one result for “malaysia broadband” on Google as of 2007, 2008 and now 2009 - and hopefully, I will be able to update this blog more often and add new features (such as the broadband coverage map which is due for a rehaul).

Given that Advertlets.com (which is my day job and 1.8 year old baby startup) is set to expand quite a bit in 2009 with a new injection of funding and staff, I hope to be able to also put together a volunteer team for RedesignMalaysia to make sure this site continues to expand as well. Drop me a mail at RedesignMalaysia@Advertlets.com if you’re interested to contribute. Telcos and broadband providers are also welcome to contact me to share details - things like your IP ranges, and coverage information will be very useful. Cheers!

PS: Also look out for The Star this Sunday. Why? Oh, no particular reason

There’s a new site up at www.saveandinvest.my . The purpose of the site is to encourage Malaysians to save money, and share their tips with others.

The part which I feel might interest you is the following: The prize of free broadband for a year - a 1 yearsubscription to Celcom Broadband for the best tips submitted.

I’ve posted up two tips so far: (go vote for them!)

Phone Bills : TM Net Streamyx Combo for new residences (waive fixed line rental fee)
It links back to this site (of course, haha), which shares the list of ISPs with pricings.

General : List of broadband service providers in Malaysia with prices
Two, a tip on how you can save on your phone bills through the TMNet Streamyx Combo which waives your fixed line bills.

Check out the site, and do post your own tips as well. I’ll be just as happy if one of the blog readers here read this.

Will be posting more broadband tips soon Including how to choose your broadband provider and cut down your costs, various pricings of broadband service providers compared, and more.

Meantime, you can check out also what some other Advertlets Bloggers have to say about the site:

Party girl Amanda Choe shares how you can get unique pieces and lower prices at flea markets
Naomi Tham writes about how sleeping early can save you money.
Student LogicYuan is smart and suggests charging your phone at work/at school.
UncleJosh talks about the growing global financial slowdown and offers some tips on how to go on dates cheaper
AprilCherrie takes you on a step by step tutorial on how to post up your tips on the site

Till then, cheers.

They say a lot of Malaysians use the Internet for banking…and Maybank has 60% market share. Who doesn’t have a Maybank2u account nowadays?

Above: Stats on Malaysian Internet banking & Maybank Domination

Its just been a few hours since the Maybank2u version 2.0 preview at Delicious @ Marc Residence in KL. I was attending the event with other Advertlets bloggers. Given that the current site has had minor revisions only since launching 7 years ago (most noticable being section seperators and odd pages), it was quite a long overdue revamp. Given that they have been pushing a lot of innovative marketing with Maybank (What is M, etc), I think it was great that the website itself would finally catch up to at least the same level with with their marketing campaigns.

A few quotes from the press materials provided:

For M2U’s revamp, Maybank and their web agency AGENDA invested in more than 350 hours of usability testing over three months, talking to different Malaysians and observing how they organised content, interacted with the initial site structure on paper and navigated through online prototypes to complete given tasks.

And more…

While the most obvious change in M2U 2.0 is its design, perhaps the most important change is the shift of focus from the business to the user. Maybank2u.com functions great as a business vehicle that features a multitude of products from Maybank’s different divisions. However, as a consumer banking portal, it falls short and users find themselves with a disorganised website. Basically, Maybank2u.com was a victim of its own success. The more popular it became, the more cluttered it grew.

And of course, they had to remedy it. You should already be familiar with the current Maybank2u.com.my

And…here’s a screenshot of new Maybank2u 2.0!

This is the main page. I can assure you it really looks like this in a browser, and its not a nice screenshot con la.

From A Web Developer Geek-Self Perspective

- I have been developing for the web even before Internet Explorer came out, so yes - I WILL CHECKS YOUR SOURCE CODEZ AS WELLS!. The agency in charge of doing it did not disappoint, and the code is quite clean and structured.
- Different stylesheets for print, mobile & screen are referenced, but contain no code. Nice to know that this is earmarked. I want to be able to access Maybank2u on my mobile (with proper stylesheets) the same way, no a better way than I can access my HSBC account on Opera Mobile on my Sony Ericsson W910i. (I can access most functions, but its not a mobile specific site).
- Kudos on the usage of Nifty Corners, an elegant way to generate rounded corners without the use of heavy code.

What lies behind this?

From A Designer Perspective

All in all, its pretty straightforwardly nice and well organized. The grid layout is consistent, and makes things easy to find.

- Yellow text on gray is unreadable. While there’s definitely a branding element to the decision, I would recommend a higher contrast color for the benefit of older customers or those with monitors with lousy color reproduction.
- Tabs & breadcrumbing (look it up) are implemented nicely, and is mostly clear.
- Ticker breaks on two line news items
- Login can utilize the rather empty right sidebar on the main page instead of being placed on a seperate page.
- Internal login design is a bit too spartan, could use some well placed icons like how it was implemented on the main page.
- Note to the team: please never put MIDI files and Javascript falling Ang Paus ever on the main page, even if its Chinese New Year (yes it has happened before previously, serious). As a person of Malaysian Chinese descent and a discerning web user, I believe a simple banner to wish me “Happy CNY” would do. Thank you in advance.

This is the landing page after you login. Note the test message - this is strictly a preview and I believe that they will be touching this up further

Notes as a consumer who uses Maybank2u quite often, to Maybank:

- I would love it if Maybank can also implement some functions ala mint.com where I can keep track of all my credit cards (assuming I had some la - I don’t), average spending, ability to group and seperate my expenses as well as get some financial advice on how to save it. Of course, this is a tall order, and this is like, cutting edge But hey, gotta start planning for version 2.5-3.0 right?
- SMS TAC notification can take very long to arrive, and occasionally never does. An alternative way of generating and sending an authentication code would be good. (IM? E-mail?)
- For the past 2 years, I have been aware of a way that I can lock someone out of their account as long I know their username (I don’t need the password). And yes, I can inconvenience thousands of people the same way as well. The method of which I will not share here to prevent grief to fellow Malaysians. But I know that I did it to myself by accident and I will be sharing this personally with the Maybank team.
- Loading speed needs to be improved. Server needs to be able to handle lots of concurrent requests and allocate for “bursts” where multiple users access at the same time (peak hours are at the start of work day perhaps?). Bandwidth for images etc should not be a lot, but its mainly the processing of requests that are causing the slow down I think. (Yes, I know this is a preview. Though, even with a couple of hundred people using it of now (I am estimating), it is still slow. I hope it is a problem with the staging server that will be resolved before the full launch).
- Sue the people who are squatting on Maybank.com. Serious! Take it back! Okay la. Maybe sue is the wrong word. Use the UDRP on them.

Anyway, overall, I am impressed with the level of effort and planning that went into this.

As someone with a history of stepping in to just fix the interface design for large web dev projects (even where the design & dev of project had been fully awarded to an large company…whose strength was development but unfortunately had little design competence), its nice to see an agency get it right in more ways than one.

The agency that put this together for Maybank (together with Maybank’s internal team of course) is Agenda Asia (formerly Delirium Cybertouch). I had a brief chat with the team, and its good to see a team get both the design and development aspect right.

Disclaimer: Maybank bought me (and quite a few others dinner), and also gave us a nice thumbdrive. Basically extending the same courtesy to bloggers as they would professional reporters. Very thoughtful, thanks. I was idiotic enough not to collect the goodie bag early before it ran out (although I arrived on time), so I have no idea what it contains.

Congratulations to Maybank, Agenda and the event planning team. Its not easy to hold an event where half the people are hungry (its Ramadan after all), and perfectly timing everything so that people get to break fast and test out the system, all within a short & impactful event. It even made it worth it to miss the first three quarters of my good friend Dennis’s birthday dinner which unfortunately coincided with the event. (To give you a sense of perspective, Amber Chia was at my good friend’s birthday dinner, with other hot chicks as well). I managed to go eventually after the M2U event, its all good

You can be assured that your effort will be rewarded by bloggers (or at least myself la) furiously stress-testing/trying to break your system using obscure Mozilla beta distributions, the too new Google Chrome, random versions of Safari on random Mac OS versions, the may-or-may-not-work Opera browser, or worse, old versions of Internet Explorer All to make sure you have the best banking system for Malaysians! Which I am eventually going to be using! You will be sure I have more suggestions to send over, which may either be helpful, tiresome, anal or useful…or a bizarre combination of two or more. Hehe.

Thanks for the chance to test it out, and I am greatly looking forward to the fully launched, polished Maybank2u 2.0. Debuting September 15th to the public AFAIK.

Some of you might be wondering why our site was down - don’t worry, we weren’t hacked, we’ve just been busy with Advertlets and some new projects…which don’t just involve web design, but also the future of broadband in Malaysia. Somewhere in those few months we forgot to renew our hosting for this site, thanks for the reminders.

We have been talking to 3 ISPs - some new, some old, and the results of which you will see coming to fruition in the next 1 month. Maybe sooner. Meantime, we are looking at having more contributing writers to help us maintain this site - e-mail me for details.

Anyway, if you’re new here, do check out one of the most useful pages on the site - The ISP list : Bet you didn’t know there are more than 15 ISPs in Malaysia. We’ll be updating it soon with new ISPs, including the recently launched IZZI.

Lastly, expect RedesignMalaysia 2.0 in Q1/Q2 2008. Great to be back, sorry for going missing…we won’t do it again

Those of you who read this blog often will know that Advertlets.com is one of our partners. The Malay and Malay language blogger community has been particularly supportive of RedesignMalaysia and Advertlets, and I’m happy to announce the following gathering in support of our local blogging scene:
Apakah Rumpun? Rumpun ‘07 adalah satu akitiviti santai yang akan menemukan para penggiat aktiviti berasaskan internet. Dengan matlamat untuk menemukan mata dengan mata antara semua yang selama ini hanya kenal melalui papan kekunci & tetikus.� weRumpun 2007 adalah pembuka tirai kepada aktiviti-aktiviti yang akan datang. Untuk edisi sulung ini, kami tampil’kan konsep santai.

Bila dan mana?25th Ogos 2007, Pelita Nasi Kandar, Jalan Ampang KL.

Apakah Advertlets? Advertlets adalah sebuah media pengiklanan generasi baru yang kool! Terima kasih kepada Advertlets yang sudi menaja Rumpun 2007 supaya kita semua dapat menikmati teh tarik, teh ‘o’ ais, tongkat ali plus atau apa-apa yang menjadi kegemaran di’sana nanti. Jika kalian belum mengenal Advertlets, ada baik’nya kalian melawat mereka dan lawatan kalian tidak akan di’kenakan bayaran sama sekali, Advertlets malah akan hulur’kan duit. Kerna itulah, Advertlets kool!

Translasi Lebih Senang: Jom datang mamak beramai-ramai, berkumpul dengan blogger blogger Melayu! Advertlets akan belanja minum wei!

Syarat: Ini terbuka kepada semua blogger di seluruh Malaysia (di Singapura atau Indonesia pun boleh turut serta!) yang menulis blog dalam Bahasa Malaysia, bukan untuk mereka yang berkaum Melayu sahaja. Walaupun begitu, tengoklah senarai kehadiran Rumpun - janganlah biarkan saya seorang Cina Beng sahaja yang di sana! Sertailah kami, dan menyaksikan aksi aksi menarik para blogger BM! Tentu heboh wei!

Sila lawati www.happypeoplemedia.com/rumpun untuk butiran yang selanjutnya.

Tukar balik kepada Bahasa Inggeris: By the way, “rumpun” means “clump”, like “gather” not grass, which is “rumput” The picture is intentionally to confuse you, I think. Haha.

How many of you here are bloggers? How many of you here use Streamyx? How many of you think broadband here needs a kick in the ass? Read on to find out how we can create greater competition in the ISP sector in Malaysia - and how we can give other smaller ISPs a marketing edge against Streamyx.

As some of you might know, me and the team at Josh Lim Ventures are responsible for this site , which campaigns for better broadband internet services here and advocates reform and competition. However, more recently, we’ve launched a blog advertising network, www.advertlets.com - an asian blog advertising network, which allows local advertisers to be heard over hundreds of local blogs. One of the most unique features to Advertlets is blog demographics, which we collect using a propietary polling system. That means, advertisers can choose which blogs to advertise on, segmented by the gender, age range and profession of each blog’s visitors. Despite a certain minister’s remarks, through our research and polling we have found that the majority of Malaysian bloggers are not unemployed women…but actually, female students aged 21-25.

Anyway, we’ve somehow managed to combine our interests of blogging and improving broadband here. In summary, we have launched a new service that would enable ISPs to compete against each other and target each others clients directly in online advertising, even with a limited budget. In short, it means for example, through our advertising system across blogs, Digi Broadband or Jaring for instance, could target verified TM Net users and offer a better deal to them. This is done through a system that display different ads across hundreds of Malaysian blogs based on users IP addresses (each local ISP is allocated a certain ISP range).

I would appreciate any assistance for RedesignMalaysia members in getting this out to the media, or the the attention of the ISPs. Please post these on your blogs too. We’ve done a lot of work on this - and we’re sure that this will be significant “ammunition” for up and coming ISPs who need to accumulate a good user base to be able to deliver good service. Thanks.

Hi guys - sorry, there hasn’t been much updates these few days. We’ve been very busy on another project (which is relevant to this site, more details in a bit). Yes, we’re still arranging interviews with the WiMax winners (good question suggestions!) - most are keen to be interviewed, but its hard to find available dates. We will keep you posted.

As some of you might have noticed, there’s a new thing in the local blogosphera and it’s called Advertlets.com. Besides being made by the same team behind RedesignMalaysia.com, here’s why its interesting: It’ll help you make money with your blog…its good for advertisers to reach a market that watches increasingly less tv, listens to less radio, and doesn’t read much of the papers. And yes - it’s not just by the same team behind RedesignMalaysia, these projects are affiliated.

Thanks to one of our volunteers (a charming and intelligent MIT graduate!), and the work of our team, we have managed to compile, match and process a list of IP address ranges from virtually all Malaysian ISPs, including: TM Net, DiGi Internet Exchange, NasionCom, MaxisNet, Airzed, Time Telekom, NTT MSC / Arc Net, Jaring / MIMOS (MIX), CNX Solutions, EB Technologies, Bizsurf, and more. With these IP range addresses, we can detect which ISP site visitors are using. You can read more on how its used with Advertlets here.

Why is this great for RedesignMalaysia.com?
1. We know what ISP you are using - and can measure popularity of ISPs.
2. In future, when this IP address database becomes larger, and we can geolocate more effectively (eg whether IPs are from Kelana Jaya or Ampang)…we can recommend you the best ISP available for your area - automatically, just by detecting your IP and matching it with other visitors in the area. This can be a combination of consumer ratings (manually submitted by the users), and also automatic speed tests of visitors accessing this site (logging in their page load time, area they are in and ISP used)

Why is this great for Advertlets.com?
1. To deliver targeted advertising to Malaysians only (so advertisers don’t waste their budget, and make their message count to the right people.).
2. To deliver relevant advertising to bloggers based on where they are - making it better for the bloggers and their visitors, and better click through rates for the advertisers due to more relevance.

So, what can RedesignMalaysia and Advertlets do together? (Please add your suggestions via the comments box)
These are a few of the ideas we have:

1. Allow all ISPs in Malaysia besides TMNet Streamyx, to target unhappy TMNet Streamyx Users based on IP - and advertise to them, encouraging them to switch ISPs! , spurring competition and allowing them to compete with Streamyx’s massive advertising budget. Eg, you browse a blog…then you notice a relevant advertisement (based on where you are): “Dear consumer, your connection speed could be 2.5x faster. would you like to try a better broadband service available in your area, Petaling Jaya?”.
2. In real time, monitor the performance of ALL ISPs in Malaysia, and which perform the best in your area (all visitors have to do is access this website and RedesignMalaysia can calculate it automatically)
3. ISPs can use the Advertlets Poll to find out more about what their consumers and potential customers want. Eg, is there demand for 2MBps broadband? How much would you pay for it? For a sample of the poll system, take a look at the “WHO ARE YOU” poll on the right hand side, or go to the Advertlets homepage (it’s on the right sidebar).
4. High traffic bloggers can help advertise the ISP that they are using on their blogs, and get a discount on their monthly broadband access charges.
5. Bloggers can choose to display RedesignMalaysia.com advertising (for free, we don’t have much funding at RedesignMalaysia…), if they have remaining ad space that is unsold. Kind of like how Google shows Public Service Announcements if there are no paying keywords matched to your blog. So, when you’re not earning money, you’re helping raise awareness on how bad broadband is here. Sign up on Advertlets.com and drop me a line if you’re up for that kind of advertising and activism!

Let us know, thanks!