Rival Wimax operator PacketOne also offers voice services to its customers, but only via its home modems.
Apart from the voice offering, Yes’ chief marketing points include no need for SIM cards (which allows customers to use multiple devices on the same account), an integrated billing platform that bundles all services into a single bill, and its cheap prepaid plan: 9 sen (almost 3 US cents) per voice minute, per SMS message and per every 3MB, as well as a 30% rebate for customers that download over 4GB a month.
“We don’t throttle users, we don’t set data caps, and we don’t lock you into 24-month contracts,” said YTL Communications CEO Wing K. Lee.
The operator is also claiming data speeds “3-5x faster” than 3G services in Malaysia, although executives declined to specify an actual speed.
The Wimax dongle specifies a peak speed of 30 Mbps. Actual speeds will depend on traffic congestion, but YTL Communications executive chairman Francis Yeoh said that “whatever the condition of usage on the network, we will be three to five times faster than 3G networks running under the same conditions.”
Yeoh also declined to reveal subscriber targets, saying only that pre-registration numbers were “beyond expectations”.