The latest broadband player in town, YES was finally unveiled last week amid some confusion whether it is truly 4G services or otherwise.  Personally,  I’m sure it is not, and so the top guys in YES  is fully aware of what is 3G vs 4G (I know even the US carrier promoting the same). But the marketing strategy penned down earlier must go on whatever it is cost. Well, let’s put that aside, I always has good faith (to certain extent) to the broadband company no matter how bad it is according to certain people, as these are the people that going to ensure Malaysian population are stay connected.

So what is YES… I haven’t had a chance to view what Yes is (though I have read lots of complaint on Twitter) because their website is inaccessible until yesterday, (whoever design and maintain the sites must be fired ) something abnormal for newly launch product.

So YES (according to their definition) is mobile internet service with voice in single pay- as-you use plan. In layman language, it is service that let you surf internet, making call and SMS all in single prepaid plan. So YES is prepaid service with voice (018-prefix) and data, without sim cards, contract or monthly commitment. The common system that we have now is dual plan for voice and data, or data plan only with pay-per-use voice plan. Sound interesting isn’t it? Just hang on..

So what it takes to subscribe to YES??

• one-time activation fee of RM50
• minimum credit purchase of RM10.
• After that, maintain a monthly usage of RM 30 to enjoy the services

Do note the monthly commitment fee, so it is not truly prepaid service, pay-as-you-use. You need to maintain certain amount on monthly basis to use the service, though YES claim to be pay-per-use service. With RM30, it will only let you use 100MB of data, 350 of SMSes or 350 minutes of call, so does it worth?? How about I only want to pay RM10, but still want to use YES? Forget it, yes.

Now talking about how much you need to pay, the first thing come thing to my mind is, it is little bit confusing. That’s boiled down due to the fact that it is prepaid service (though not truly), rather than postpaid service.  The data is charged based in block of 3MB.

• 9 sen for each 3MB of data
• 9 sen for each sms
• 9 sen for 1 minute call

Expensive?? Quite, but to be fair it does provide rebate for data usage above 2.5GB.

• Data usage 2.5 GB, eligible for RM9 rebate – 2.4sen/MB
• Data Usage 3.0GB, eligible  RM23 rebate – 2.25sen/MB
• Data usage 4.0GB and above, rebate 30% of every GB.

Simple mathematics will do if it is cheaper than the rival. This calculation is not based on block of 3MB data.

• If I only use 2GB of data (not qualify for any rebate), I’ll pay RM60, assuming 1MB is 3 sen
• If I use 3GB of data (amount of data in Digi Smartplan), I’ll pay Rm67.50, slightly cheaper than Digi Smartplan.
• If I use 20Gb permonth – without rebate, I have to pay Rm600, and with 30 percent rebate, so I’ll pay Rm420.  Streamyx, Unifi or even P1 4G is even cheaper than this one.

So, now I can conclude that the usage is more suitable for your mobile device not for home usage.

YES come swith 2 optional devices during the launch.

• Huddle (RM399) – Protable router, aka Mifi, to share the YES connection through wifi connection to up to 4 devices
• Go (RM99) – an USB modem

2 other device will be introduced on December

• Buzz – 4G phone, made by Samsung
• Zoom – 4G gateway

Now,  this is another big question about YES, which provide simcard-less service when all phones here are using sim card. Without sim card, I feel it is going to be difficult to existing phone users to adopt YES, especially when most smartphone rely on sim card to get into network. YES perhaps more suitable to users that looking for data plan, instead of voice plan, as it need specially made phone to hook up into the YES network. And again, data can only be accessed through the special modem and mifi from YES, further dampen any hope that standard mifi or USB modem will compatible with YES. Yet, this is another obstacles to get user using YES, unless YES willing to provide free mifi or USB modem, how’s that?

When committing ourselves to any wireless broadband services, the signal strength and consistency is the utmost priority. YES claim to have 65% coverage in Peninsular Malaysia with over 1500 base station deployed so far out of 2500 base stations it plan to have. The majority area at Klang Valley as the main economy hub in Malaysia should under the coverage, but do not expect the same quality enjoy everywhere. Unfortunately, there is no tool available in YES website to check the coverage, so you have to either walk in to YES store or call their customer service for confirmation. The broadband service in Malaysia tend to be good for the first couple of months before it started to give you headache, so will YES do the same?

I don’t know if YES is up to expectation right now, and I’m sure I don’t need one as well. The initial reaction from early users are not really positive, with some can’t connect to the network, user ID cannot be identified, and of course the far from impressive speed touted by YES, who boldly claim it’s network is 5 times faster than 3G. By any standard, such bad impression should be totally avoided upon launching any product/services but sometime it is just out of control. So what do you think about YES, are you satisfy with it?