Jan 31 2009
Hujan Batu: On Prepaid vs Postpaid
I’m going to start a brief sporadic column on life and lifestyle in Malaysia vs Singapore. Here’s my first one on Prepaid vs Postpaid mobile numbers inspired by Fauzi Rassull’s piece on Stingy and Cheapskate Mobile Phone Users.
I’ve never been on a prepaid number before. I’ve ran up my bills before, yes, but never did I switch to a prepaid number. When I was a teenager, it was not a necessity item yet. We were still on the pagers. And then, learning that everybody (well, almost everybody) in Kuala Lumpur uses prepaid made me a bit uncomfortable. A prepaid line is synonym with younger folks, school-going teenagers in Singapore, foreign labour workers perhaps; and a temporary number for others who need to adjust their finances a bit before returning to their regular number for the grown-ups. I know some Malaysian execs who use prepaid! What’s going on? Some Singaporeans don’t even know what ‘post-paid’ means (in which in English, its actually an inappropriate description) because it’s not widely used.
It was weird for me to learn about ‘tembak‘ (‘to shoot’). To tembak is to miss-call somebody with hopes they’d call you back because with free incoming calls, you’d save on your credit. Comes in handy especially when you have no credit left. It also gives a damn good excuse when you can’t contact somebody. “Kredit aku dah habis”.
Prepaid in Singapore (that’s Starhub, SingTel and M1) promote so much in Urdu and Tagalog that you’d think that the service is actually meant for them. Yes, it’s handy when you don’t have a permanent address and need to be able to manage your finances. But prepaid in Malaysia is an entire different ballgame. They advertise so much, compete with each other to the ground and get this; partners with the major radio stations so much so that the DJs are advertising it every talkset. That should up their pay, wouldn’t it?
So the telcos in Malaysia (namely Maxis, Digi, and Celcom) come up with price plans that rival each other so much that eventually makes their services virtually free of charge. One such example is when a huge percentage of Indonesian manpower in Malaysia uses Celcom for their great Indonesian call discounts would probably offset their mobile charges with new sign-ups and advertising. Peterpan becomes the face of Celcom amongst other Indonesian artistes, and the other telcos lose all their Indonesian customers to Celcom. The masses slam Celcom for prioritizing Indonesian artistes over Malaysian especially during these times when most are calling to boycott foreign music. Then they made Aaron Aziz to become the face of their new price plan! The irony! Aaron is Singaporean, hello.
Telcos in Malaysia make big money selling ringbacktones. The ability to replace your dialing tone with your favourite song has made a few people at the top very very rich. In Singapore, you can get Rui En’s latest stuff on Starhub. Rui who? Yeah precisely. Paying a monthly RM3 subscription using a prepaid mobile number makes so much sense because you do not think twice to pay that little to make your favourite song into your fone’s dialing tone. In the meanwhile, postpaid line holders in Singapore don’t even know what’s the difference between a ringtone and a ringbacktone hence the New Media marvel that made Aliff Aziz’s ‘Sayang Sayang’ a household name in Malaysia never caught on in his own hometown.
I’m ok that I hold a Malaysian prepaid line, I think I’d rather be using a prepaid line, especially when some halfhour calls to Singapore during peak hours eat up almost RM25. That beats paying the startling SGD700 on my postpaid when I get careless surfing on GPRS and talking to Salim during his break. I’m not saying Malaysia has a better telecommunication service to their people, not that its flawless but I’d like to believe Singaporean mobile users are being shortchanged big time on New Media like ringtones, ringbacktones and such. It should only get better, but it didn’t. If SingTel could spend promotions translating all their price plans and do up bus-stop ads targetted at Bangladeshi and Filipinos, I think it could do wonders if they reached out to 300,000 Malay folks on this tiny red dot.
We’re not big on ringtones in Singapore right? So why are Anuar Zain’s ringtones available in Singapore and not officially in Malaysia? Go figure! Maybe because he’s the only single artiste who could sell more than 50,000 copies of his original latest CD in a country that feeds on illegal downloading and piracy, he doesn’t need to do a New Media sale. But that, my friend, is an entirely separate piece to write about.
