December Mobility: Malaysian ‘Kena Potong’

This article appeared in December issue of Mobile World Magazine

Everyone in Malaysia is talking about P1’s Potong ad campaign which certainly got Malaysians all riled up. People are sharply divided on whether the ad was in bad taste or not with debate raging on almost every media and at every level; from the mamak shops all the way up to parliament.

I don’t plan to add my two cents worth to that particular debate.

But I really like one of the positive outcomes of this campaign. It has brought the state of our broadband, mobile or wired, out into the open. While the advertisement got a lot of attention because of its provocative message, the ad really hit home hard because it touched a chord with frustrated wired broadband users fed up with the quality and speed they get from their Internet account. There is a lot of pent up frustration among Malaysians with the state of broadband in the country. It’s a safe bet that anyone who surfs the Net in Malaysia will at one time or another experience terrible internet speeds and even complete downtime.

Until the ad came out, I think that a lot of people had even got sensitized to the whole issue to the point that they accept it and move on. I suspect a lot of Malaysians even believe that this same sorry situation with broadband speed exists all over the world due to increasing Internet use and the popularity of media rich applications and websites. I’m reasonably sure that the average Malaysian would have placed our broadband quality at below that advanced nations such as Korea, Japan, US, EU and our oft quoted nemesis Singapore but ahead of many developing nations.

Read the rest of this article on the current Mobile World December 2009 issue. Subscribe here.