Screenshots

can't comment on the voting system breakdown mentioned but i must admit after watching the finals, my personal opinion is faizal is the runaway winner. even my wife thinks so too. shows like this is like an election, be popular, get your votes in early, get ahead and if the rivals make any head way towards the end, you too far ahead to change thing.

I guess I'm one of those people who voted for Faizal during the Final night. Between my wife and I, I think we voted like more than 100 times and we got the error 1001 message.

We were shocked when Suki won and felt that Faizal was robbed of the chance to win. Even the COO of 8TV mentioned during the press conference that there were 100,000++ votes the whole week. I'm sure it cannot be so little. What happened to the other votes during the final night?

A most disappointing finale. My wife and especially, myself, went to bed feeling that the voting system is indeed flawed.

in the first place why bother to vote? The reason for this show is just to make money. you expect real talent to come out from this? Despite Suki winning and Faizal getting a standing ovation, their combined effort couldnt be worth more than RM1000. The whole sms craze and voting system opened to public is just to make money. And most of the contributors comes from family members of contestants. Would you not spend RM100 for a RM1000 prize money? And if you are financially stable, would you not "risk/gamble" away RM to secure RM1mil? This same thing happened during M/Idol and M/Idol 2.

BY right it is high time Fatwa issue a ruling to ban such voting systems as it doesnt reflect on skills, talents but merely whoever/whichever support group has more money will win.

So what's next? Once in a RM1.5mil?

JEFF OOI says: Go play God elsewhere. You are hijacking an issues of public interest with your sermon about being a moral guardian of your own backyard.

I experienced the same error message mentioned.

"E1001: Sorry, your request has not been successful. Please try again later."

However, I can't be sure whether those unsuccesful sms were charged, will check the bill and if they charged for something which is not successful, I would ask for refund!

It is good that somebody said something about the SMS services that charges people at different rates. It is always bad when you pay but you did not get the services. I may be wrong, but I think it is not the first time. I bet not many of us are listening to KLFM. They are charging RM.50 for every messages sent to the station. SMS senders are lucky to have their SMS read on the air. What about those SMS who were not rea? They are also charged RM.50. After some digging, I found out that all SMS are listed over the web,but who want to pay RM.50 for their SMS be listed on the web, when their intention is to have their SMS read by the radio DJ.

Can anybody do some audit on all radio SMS services? Are they being fair to their listeners?

I would like to think the SMS voting system is kinda traffic management and queueing system like any other messaging system.

Real time system like this will bound to be flawed (error) if the designer never take into account the max number of votes that may go in at the same time. For 100% pass, votes that cannot be processed immediately should be queued and timestamped at the time it was sent.

As a matter of fact, you can never have 100% accuracy in any traffic management system. The question I would like to forward to 8TV is how many votes were bounced back? How many votes for each contestant? Will 8TV reveal the data?

Nevertheless, if the votes for Faisal is bounced back, I guess the similar portion of votes for other contestants could have been bounced back too.

I think Suki deserved it. She is good.

Hi groo

I cannot but agree with you. This craze is like gambling. If you hear all the stories about Genting casino, you should not gamble there. But, there are people who still do.

I also remember this small gambling thing in shops which enticed school children to insert money to win prizes. I heard that the government has banned this rudimentary gambling machine. Is the ban still on? I thought I spotted this at the village shop not long ago.

On the SMS gambling plot. First, some smart brains create a new crazy idea, and then inject this craze into unsuspecting people turning them into zombies.

The whole thing is about making money – the more the merrier. If you have to use power deals to achieve this, why not? If you have to lie a little here and cheat a little there, why not?

Thinking people like En Ghazalie Abdullah should demand for an investigation. In fact, people who have participated in all the other SMS contests should ask questions and find out if they have been conned.

I agree with groo, where else do you think the 1 million came from? generous voters like you guys lah!

Do you know that old-fashioned contests organized by business organizations can be turned into con games?

If you want to win the first prize like a house or car, you go and make a deal with the organizers.

You will be declared the winner, you get the prize, you sell it and distribute the proceeds among those involved.

It's shocking why people feel no shame in doing this.

The best voting method should come from the web....." Web Voting " ... i prefer that...no $$$ involved....sms are too much.... paying for nothing....

I wonder, unless they are your family members or friends, why bother wasting your good money to these people? And yet people are complaining petrol, chili and chicken price increase.

Talk about the OIAM show, the day Suki voted out, is the day I realised she'll be the one. She was voted highest IN, and ever since they never announce Highest vote for IN, becuase it was Suki - everyweek.

Being voted out and voted in back was a scam / gimmick by OIAM.

On final, 2 reason Suki wons was

1) Strong support by chinese fan while malay votes was splitted between Faisal and Alif.

2) Many guys voted for Suki while girls punya votes splitted between 2.

If 8Tv is smart enough, there will be small prints saying somthing like "the results are final and the organiser has the right not to entertain any questions". My bet on this is there is nothing much that can be done. They are in the industry long enough for them to know this kind of thing will happen.

Just for everyone's info,

my wife's votes for Suki encountered the same problem.
Till morning.

Now, these smses should not be charged. Otherwise it is fraud.

Suki's votes were pumped in thru the week. A lot more of Faisal's were during the show.
You can see even Alif's got good number of votes thru the week, to start as number two.
Suki and Alif have the young voters, family and friends.
Faizal has older voters or supporters like Ghazali and me - who will vote on performance - but too late.

haha.

seriously, I think RM100,000 is cukup for what we saw.

My wife and I think Nita would have wonb this outright. ANd that would be justifiable 1 million.

Happy Malaysia.

ROFL. Since it involve money,telecommunication and consumer rights, who whole should regulate the "game" if there is "technical problem"? MCMC, MOF, MITI?

Chukles....some religions forbid all sort of gambling, and "one in a million" SMS voting is an obvious gambling. So should JAKIM step in..(ROFL)

my question is, even if the sms sytem works, what's keeping the show's producers from rigging the results to ensure a more entertaining show?

i happen to know some of the malaysian idol finalists and there were allegations of manipulated votes then as well.

nothing new, i'd say this whole vote via sms thing is nothing more then a very profitable gimmick that is being used to rip money off unsuspecting viewers.

They make a hefty profit from every sms sent in - and unlike credible shows where they have independent trustworthy firms to audit and be impartial about the results, what happens here is they themselves tally the votes and milk the audience for more sms'es. Nothing is made open to the public, and this concept is now so widely used it covers even radio shows where u submit sms'es, and get charged a bomb - irrespective of whether your get what you paid for.

Even the eventual winners these days seem very "made up". I for one did not watch the one-in-a-million show because i've seen enough of this charade to know its a scam, but from radio phone in's promising mega bucks, to talent contests with no talent whatsoever, the sms scam is now a one way casino for media companies.

i don't know for sure how these vote-taking systems work, but i don't find it hard to imagine what kind of problems can arise when it's bombarded by thousands of sms in a short period of time and the telco's keep retrying until the messages got through.
to this particular viewer's imagined right to have his votes registered, all i can say is: "ha,ha! sucker!"
i would have expected jeef, our favorite IT-savvy tabloid owner, to know better than to blow this trumpet....

JEFF OOI says: You kids are looking at their father coming to this blog to LAN SAI KONG (LSK). Attack the issue, not the person. Don't call me names (Jeff who owns the IT-savvy tabloid) if you can't behave properly to stake good reasoning and engage my readers with civil, intellectual conversations.

You can engage me to a debate through private emails if you want to find chink in the armour, you start it, and I will know how to finish it off. But I will not allow you to cheapen my blog by taking cheap potshots at individuals -- you canm do it to me, you can do it to anybody. That's not "THINKING ALLOWED, THINKING ALOUD" because you can't THINK in the first place excpet to take potshots at all and sundry.Let me tell you in the face that, no apologies, that I want to set an example for Malaysian blogosshere as much as I am giving my bandwidth to better use. I have you banned for now. Go and LSK elsewhere (by LSK, that's to tell you kids it meant for Lan Sai Kong' if I hadn't made it clear to you ;-) .

i saw the programme for the first time yesterday, sunday, afternoon. (rerun of the final?)
i was very impressed to find that they not only have "vote-in" lines but also "vote-out" lines! wow, that increases the product range by 100% and should easily increases income by 20-30%. pure genius!

JEFF OOI says: To prevent other LAN SAI KONG from missing the trees for the bush, the context to this blog topic os not whete Faizal or Suki should win. It's about known flaws of SMS gateway bottleneck that rejected in-coming votes and the outcome may have differed from voting dynamics. Two, whether the rejected SMS, with returned notifier from the SMS gateway or error, has been billiable at premium rate. These need clarification from 8TV,and prior revelation of flaws by 8TV didn't help mitigate the issue.

Just because Suki won (instead of people fave Faizal), everyone thinks there must be something wrong with the voting system ka? Hahahaha so silly...

While the guys at Media Prima are getting raya bonus already, thank for ur SMS.

Dear meyour,

You may be right about how the general populace may have voted, i.e. chinese voted for Suki ad the malay votes were split for Faizal and Alif.

However, my wife and I voted for Faizal as we felt he was a run-away winner but we're both chinese.

Are you saying that the audience of OIAM voted based on racial lines? I really do not think so. But after going through the weekly winners of the audience on the OIAM website, I did realize that most voters are very young. Mostly born in the 80s.

Thus, I think most of the voters voted based on which singer they could relate to more. I think the younger ones voted for Suki and Alif whilst the older ones voted for Faizal.

I did not vote but I like Suki and I am happy she won. YES!!!

Sorry, ya, those bounced sms also happened to Suki voters OK. Thank you, Streetz for addressing this fact before I did.

My sympathy to Faizal and his supporters. I cannot deny his fantastic showmanship tapi still, I like Suki.

Just like MI2, now matter how flawless was Nita's performance during the finale, I still like Daniel despite his shaky start singing Mimpi and the closing.

Why so rowdy about this thing? If you like, you can also go and say the same about Mentor, Akademi Fantasia etc.

Hi all,

Firstly, i'll reiterate one fact, which is that for all those people who voted and failed to get their vote in for their singer of choice, a SMS engine is unable to tell who you voted for, so i'm pretty sure suki's fanbase votes were not getting submitted as well.

Next, E1001 - this is a programmer's lingo for something like Error 1001, which means that when a SMS (MO) is sent to the shortcode (5 digit no), with the keyword, it is relayed to the system owner. Since all mobile phone users can vote and this error is reflected regardless on what telco line you are on, this is confirmation that this error message is not at the telco gateway level (pretty obvious, but should be made clear), therefore, the cause of the error is probably because:

1. telco sends the SMS to the provider's server and the number of requests in to the server is too great, hence, the error (however, it probably is not this - see below)
2. the application server receives the SMS and tries to store it in the Database, which could not handle so much traffic.

So whose fault is it? The service provider not providing a better set of servers? media prima not doing more? How to move on? The service provider should have a set of logs of SMS commands that came in (servers log a lot of stuff) and do a manual calculation? If problem 2 occured, this whole process will be a lot harder.

Again, as usual, malaysian content providers underestimated the traffic and overestimated their own server capabilities.

Also, for the many many votes, a nice fat percentage goes to the telcos, so don't think it's just media prima profiting from this. SMS votes that resulted in an ERROR, you will not be charged for the message that is returned to you informing you about the error, but you were already charged a standard SMS charge for the SMS that you sent in to the shortcode.

Anyway, just some information about the wicked but wonderful world of SMS campaigns. My general advice is, just know that every big SMS voting campaign will result in servers keeling over. This is because everyone is greedy and do not want to lessen their profit margins by purchasing dedicated servers for a voting campaign such as this. Judges decisions should be the base of reference and not sms voting because at the end of the day, all these reality singing shows are just a popularity contest. The best way to ensure that companies who provide such services do a better job is to provide voting reports to be audited by a select party. Why no one does this? maybe cause it's just another damn reality show. Who knows.

Finally, suki won, don't take her glory away by saying votes for the other two contestants weren't coming in. I'm sure suki's votes were not getting in too.

-

JEFF OOI says: Go play God elsewhere. You are hijacking an issues of public interest with your sermon about being a moral guardian of your own backyard.

WOW!!!

JEFF OOI says: Take that as a warning...for those who trivialise my blog and to cheapen it. Let people speak with rationale not Taliban-styled sermons and edict.

Unfortunately this kind of show is known for encouraging favoritism within the contestants and having viewers vote for their "favorite" rather than singing ability. This treatment, as regretable as it is, places social status above musical aesthetics.

The SMS provider is Dapat Vista (M) Sdn Bhd. as evidenced by the SMS short code 32728 aka 'DAPAT' (check your handphone to be sure).

It is extremely possible that there just weren't enough machines to handle the large volume of SMS and in the case of OIAM votes, they were queued and processed way past the deadline date(time).

Here's the website for confirmation:

http://www.dapat.com/

sounds more like it was a "one in a million" chance the audience gets to vote.

amybe the system got jammed by those millions of smses it receives per hour. it got jammed, and put incoming msgs in queue, by the time ti could finish up the whole messages received, the deadline time was met. hence it rejects/bounced back all those sms that was in queue and incoming after that..
like you are selling tickets, if the ticket counter was supposed to be closed at 11, those in queue just had to trash off their intention of getting a ticket from there.

a good question would be if the service provider charged for the rejected smses, not wether the voting system is flawed or not.

my 2cents :) cheers

sms voting will always be flawed. sure the rejected votes will made an impact on the outcome of the result. one may say "i want to vote for so and so but my vote was not accepted. it's not fair". to begin with sms voting had never been fair. if your votes did not get in, too bad. it's a case of being lucky or being fast.

methink the rejected sms will be billed all the same since the sms was already sent in. again we will hear whisper of 'not fair' here.
but what the hell those people in business care about fair. as long as they get thier money, they couldn't bother.

btw, to judge a winner through sms votes is something i don't agree to.

I wasnt watching this show because I was doing something more productive; shaving orangutans.

Dont misunderstand me; I love reality shows. Especially ones where the PUBLIC gets to decide who wins something.

I love votes that have no basis; I would buy a beer for anyone who votes just to be sadistic about the whole thing. Vote for the guy who sounds like a strangled chihuahua, let the ones who really can sing cry like babies when they get booted off the show. I think there should be a collection of moments where this happens, I would play this in slow motion and laugh my panda a** off at these people who thought this was a "talent competition". Crazy freaks.

There should be a reality show about heart-surgery; the public decides which surgeon gets to operate on the dying victim. That would be so fantabulous.

"Oh vote for the hot latino looking guy!" "But hes the janitor." "I dont care, I like him, Im going to vote."

Then a guy dies because the chief surgeon left a snickers wrapper in his intestines and puts the skin together with krazy glue.

Now thats entertainment!

What do you mean the people wouldnt know how to differentiate a good doctor from a smoking hot one, or would vote based on crazy reasons and would mess the whole thing up?

Thats what reality shows are for! To screw up the lives of self-righteous crazies who think that they are truly deserving because they are the best at it. I hope some people are scarred for life, we can make a follow-up show about reality tv losers. Edgy and great entertainment for the whole family.

It gets irritating sometimes when the public gets it right, but it soothes my heart to know that for every one time a guy who deserves to win actually wins, ten other times we can rely on people to vote on affiliation, sympathy or just plain craziness.

I love this world.

I wasnt watching this show because I was doing something more productive; shaving orangutans.

Dont misunderstand me; I love reality shows. Especially ones where the PUBLIC gets to decide who wins something.

I love votes that have no basis; I would buy a beer for anyone who votes just to be sadistic about the whole thing. Vote for the guy who sounds like a strangled chihuahua, let the ones who really can sing cry like babies when they get booted off the show. I think there should be a collection of moments where this happens, I would play this in slow motion and laugh my panda a** off at these people who thought this was a "talent competition". Crazy freaks.

There should be a reality show about heart-surgery; the public decides which surgeon gets to operate on the dying victim. That would be so fantabulous.

"Oh vote for the hot latino looking guy!" "But hes the janitor." "I dont care, I like him, Im going to vote."

Then a guy dies because the chief surgeon left a snickers wrapper in his intestines and puts the skin together with krazy glue.

Now thats entertainment!

What do you mean the people wouldnt know how to differentiate a good doctor from a smoking hot one, or would vote based on crazy reasons and would mess the whole thing up?

Thats what reality shows are for! To screw up the lives of self-righteous crazies who think that they are truly deserving because they are the best at it. I hope some people are scarred for life, we can make a follow-up show about reality tv losers. Edgy and great entertainment for the whole family.

It gets irritating sometimes when the public gets it right, but it soothes my heart to know that for every one time a guy who deserves to win actually wins, ten other times we can rely on people to vote on affiliation, sympathy or just plain craziness.

I love this world.

Mobile telcos have a guideline for their mobile content providers who use their reverse billing api.

If you bill a user for a premium sms, it must be informed (usually the first line/few characters) of the actual price charged. If it's a free sms, it must be made known as well.

These are guidelines and it may not have been strictly enforced. The only way to tell is to monitor your bills. Post paid transcripts should easily list out the charges. Tough luck for prepaid users unless you've monitored your last known balance, which is difficult to do.

Recently, Telekom has gotten into the game as well, and now allows mobile content providers to charge customers who dial their numbers/shortcodes through the FIXED phone line as well. One of the recent partner is Macrokiosk and their ThumbTV game show project.

You think getting spammed/charged for sms is bad ? Just wait till your fixed phone line gets it.

JEFF OOI says: Go play God elsewhere. You are hijacking an issues of public interest with your sermon about being a moral guardian of your own backyard.

WOW!!!

JEFF OOI says: Take that as a warning...for those who trivialise my blog and to cheapen it. Let people speak with rationale not Taliban-styled sermons and edict.

Jeff,

IN what way has my comments cheapen your blog? My first post was abt how reality shows votings are out for viewers money and doesnt really reward true talents and skills. For this particular topic, i think many other commenters have put in more out-of-topic views than mine.

JEFF OOI says: It's impertinent of you to have brought in this line of slant, QUOTE: "BY right it is high time Fatwa issue a ruling to ban such voting systems as it doesnt reflect on skills, talents but merely whoever/whichever support group has more money will win." UNQUOTE. You will attract trolls to hijack my blog context. And my blog context is: Has the voting system flawed? Has the rejected SMS, returned with a premium tariff? You are wasting my time for not owning up. What has Fatwa got to do with my blog entry of this?>

The real winner here is not Suki or some other guy that we are suppose to assumed.

The mobile Telcos are the real winners. Thru sms they made millions since its(program) inception.So what is one million? & they cant bothered whether the voting system is tinted or not..."kami tak kisah" so says the Mobile telcos.

cheers.

Thank you very much for all the comments posted here. My concerns remain. 8TV would need to explain if they did the following -

1. Due Diligence : In fully understanding how its voting system would work in the interest of fairness to its voters who pay to vote and to the contestants who worked very hard to compete; if its voting machinery would be able to withstand the on-slaught of massive voting, and if it would be fail-proof to ensure a fair, clean and accurate determination of the winner.
2. Risk Management - What would 8TV do if its voting machinery failed? What would it need to do in the event of such failure? What course of action would it need to initiate given that it had a desire to announce the results on the same night? Now that it is discovered that there are numerous failed votes, what is the next course of action?
3. Good Governance - As a responsible TV station to its viewers, and as a responsible corporation since it is a company under a public-listed entity. RM1 million is involved. Would the board of its parent company allow for the disbursement of a massive prize money if there is an element of doubt cast on the reliability of the votes. Were there external auditors to ensure that all is well and clean with the voting and voting system? How many failed smses did 32728 despatch, and in what proportions for the three contestants? Did the proportions reveal another winner?

So much doubts and concerns have arisen in the last 48 hours. Enquiring minds would really like to know honest answers ..

Ghazalie Abdullah

Here's my 2 cents ...many of the voting systems in our country are not very well correlated to the telco's SMSC's.

Typically, you can have your own GSM modem and run your own SMS based voting system, but then you also need to make sure your voting apps have a spooling mechanism to spool.... typically home grown SMS solutions do not usually take into consideration of the express message sending needs!

Hence, step 2 is to work with the Telco where you have an app that talks to the Telco's SMSC (SMS-CEntre) and the voting system comes though the telco SMSC to the 3rd party apps which calculates votes!

BUT ....u have to know the capcity of the SMSC....which are usually counted as messages per scond ....typically we have systems of capacity between 500 and 2000 Messages per sec. But durign Voting this isnot enough, and for traditional SMSC's u get backlogged response...in the case above... it can be due to 2 reasons:

1) Telco maxed out it's capcity of MPS or
2) The link between the SMSC and the 3rd party app maxed out its capacity?

Any other way to do it?

Yes, new generation SMS solutions, such as the SMS router solutions solves these problems in 2 steps:

1) They saparate mobile traffic and 3rd part app traffic on saparate engines ...and you can configure certain message types as "do or die" meaning the message MUST go through first time or it's discarded immediately... this is needed to acertain integrity of TV based voting systems..there is no use u send a vote now and it is tabulated 2 hours later!

However, our Telco's dont have any plans to move to such solutions, as they seem pretty happy with the authordox SMSC technology...which is predominantely supplied by LC!

New startups and other big operators like Vodaphone an O2 UK have embraced the next generation SMS routers and have seen the benefit of direct delivery, SMS grooming and other such features!

I hope this screw up will open up the minds of telco's to upgrade the SMS service ....in fact SMS solution have the best business cases, u usually recoup investment within a year, if not 1.5 yrs!

Secondly, there must be regulation to stop home grown SMS router solutions that arebuilt on top of GSM modems as no one can gurantee the QOS of such services! It must be allr egulated and done through the operators and MCMC must make sure the opreators all upgrade to direct delivery solutions, instead of the older store and forward SMSC's!

Hope this helps!

JEFF OOI says: Thanks Goks. It's education for Screenshots readers. Appreciate it.

New startups and other big operators like Vodaphone an O2 UK have embraced the next generation SMS routers and have seen the benefit of direct delivery, SMS grooming and other such features!
which still delivered late replies during World Cup for sms goal notification messages.

Thank you for the input. At 500-2000 messages per second, 8TV would need to know from the telcos what their normal sms traffic numbers are. And what their expectations are for OIAM. Put them together and you would appreciate if there would be possible severe congestion. If the risks were high for a choke on the system, then how and what needs to be managed? Did they have the experts on standby to rectify? Or did it all just go awry, leaving 8TV's COO to say he was still counting??

While Goks has a point with regards to the Telco SMSC setup (God knows we need to improve our wireless and IT infra in this country!!) and 3rd party modem connections, this does not appear to be the case with the events that triggered the delays and errors.

The error message E1001 is telco-based upward (MO) error and not from the voting system and implies, your SMS to the said shortcode (and voting system) was usuccessful.

External service providers are not connected directly to Telco's SMSC these days. It goes through the ECPA/CMP/CPA platforms. If there is a bottleneck, its an internal communication between that point and the delivery mechanism i.e. SMSC/BSC/OMC (take a pick). So, whether the voting system is handled by a CMMi Level 5 certified apps or a GPRS modem, its irrespective to the outcome observed in this case.

The main problem here is - lack of planning by the organizers. Telco's WILL make proper provisioning for burst in traffic during voting shows - if they are advised so. I know it, cause we have done it before, not just in M'sia, but in the SMS-capitol of the world Philippines too - which by the way operates between 750-800 tps on peak hours. Instead of having separate streams open up for the vote-based SMS, it appears it was mixed with the general traffic load and hence all the MT's got queued up. Imagine running a race on the federal highway at 8.30am.. get the idea?

500-2000 tps per telco, is bloomin high and sufficient for the M'sia public - even at 500 tps, thats 90K transactions a minute downstream! Not enough, meh? Now, you guys are all smart business folks with MBA's and what not - would you, invest in a system that is dependant on high volume that you may or may not get and if so, perhaps 3-4 times a year only? How do you justify the cost - especially when there is a way around using existing system? :)

This all boils down to lack of planning and taking counter measures by the ppl who organized the show from the top level. Don't blame the system...

Saying that, you may want to raise the RM0.50 charging with MCMC and CfM. There is a strong case where the MO's were delivered late (which the voting system has no control over) when it shouldnt have. In this case, am sure the telco's would refund the affected users without much hassle, especially with a error E1001 glaring at their face... :D

JEFF OOI says: Thanks Nav for the quality input. This is definitely the type of of quality readers' comments that make Screenshots distinctive. We have had three+ years of ranting and whining. Let's get intellectual to helpnurture an informed public.
.

Geez...

What's the matter with you people as to who won?

When you enter a competition, you ALREADY know HOW the winner will be decided - in this case, through SMS votes.

When you register to participate, and when you vote, it means you're accepting the manner in which the system works (as in through SMS votes).

In this case, OIAM, Suki got the most votes. Let's not question her ability or talent. She just won with the most number of SMSs - PERIOD.

Am I a fan of her? No. I think Faizal was the better man that night, but I don't begrudge Suki for it simply because that's how the competition works - popularity rules in OIAM.

Just because I thought Faizal was the better man, I con't expect everyone to think like me, and be a sore loser.

As to why Suki won it instead of Zainal?

I don't think it's racially motivated as what most people think.

She's 17, and has the young and vibrant personality, the cute factor, that appeals to MOST college youngsters, teenagers or fresh grads. These are the people who spend more money on their daily dose of SMS that you will spend on your total phone bill in a month. These are the people who have the spending power, and exercises them.

One voter in that category would out vote perhaps 5 voters in other categories. Also, due to the short voting period, these people can often type faster SMSs than you can say Eureka.

Is it not surprising then that she won?

Let's not insult the Malaysian mentality by saying that we vote on racial lines alone, and lets not argue based on that fact. It's disgusting, and it's shameful.

And to condemn that OIAM is based on popularity and not talent, geez...grow up. That's life dude.

Politicans are voted in, because they are popular, might not be the best man for the job (just look at some of the comments in the newspaper). Do we cry foul?

People buy albums not because of the singer's singing ability only, rather because of their charisma and popularity. Don't believe? Look around and see how many singers are really talented?

Life is never fair. Grow up and accept it. Don't be a cry baby.

Yes, I agree with you that this is a popularity contest. It's all about choosing a popular icon with the best attributes. And yes, there is your choice, my choice and the right choice for a winner. But I think you missed the wood for the trees here in this blog that was initiated. The bone of contention is that a number of votes for the contestants were returned. If they had not been returned, I don't think viewers would have complained. They would just figure that their votes had gone in successfully and were among those that didn't quite help make the high for their favourite. But in this case, the MMDC set the rules and the E1001 smses kept coming right up to the next morning at 4.15 am, prompting enquiring minds to really really really think - hey what happened? This blog aims to discover what happened. Was their due diligence, good governance and risk management taken up by 8TV to ensure all was proper for the voting system? Or were they blinded by a motive of profit as alluded by some in the blog? In short, did they as a responsible company, treat their voting viewers right?

Ghazalie Abdullah

My wife and I sent over 70 votes between the both of us for Faizal. And like so many viewers, we received error messages at 4am. It's not so much who won, or who's more popular, or even who's making whose money. The error messages cast doubts on the integrity of the contest.

I was at the Grand Finale. During the commercial break after Faizal's performance, comperes Awal and Marion were up on stage minutes before the show went on air again - with the results in hand! This was minutes before they announced that the voting had ended. What did this mean? That a decision had been made even before the votes had been cast? The question would not even been on my mind, had I not received error messages in the middle of the night.

Did Suki really win? Or did Faizal manage to catch up with his performance that night. For a million bucks, you'd expect 8TV to practice a little more care in the voting process, but alas, this was not so. And this is despite 8TVs prior experience in the last 2 Malaysian Idols. Didn't they learn anything back then?

There was no doubt that Suki had been the favourite amongst viewers right from the very start. And while Faizal made a pretty impressive comeback at the end of the program - he got the only standing ovation that night - did he even have a FAIR SHOT at the RM 1,000,000?

BTW, here's another angle (or slant): Think Quiz Show

Nav,

Good update! Well as you said, there could be a bottleneck both on the SMSC or the Mesaging gateway layer .... both which has it's own resource contraints!

Hence why i beleive telco's should look into upgrading their messaging solutions to support direct delivery .... even with good planning and high capacity, tradional SMSC still performs the STORE THEN FORWARD sequence for each message!

However today, when u have direct delivery SMS solutions, u avoid this time and capacity needs as it FORWARD, IF FAIL STORE sequence!

Also, the SMSC itself should seggregate the MO traffic and 3PP gateway traffic. Though today, the MIddleware APPS do it (as you mentioned above) this just adds to the processing time, bottlenecks & contraints!

Either way, to me, SMS capcity for example of 700-800 MPS usually is based on MO traffic. Telco's rarely dimension taking into consideration 3PP traffic, which is increasing everyday, in the SMS business case!

For exmple, a telco in SG has 600MPS capacity but it failed miserably to delivery on time durign festive seasons and voting, promoting this company to be very cautious about supporting external voting apps!

In malaysia, unfortunately we cant reveal in public the SMSC capacity of the operators but it's surely higher then our neighbours..YET ..this will never be enough to support nationwide SMS voting systems which can peak at 3-4K MPS!

Th is sticky, but i guess many operator do not really look into the 3PP needs when it comes to voting!

As for what you said on O2 & Vodaphone, what i know is the O2 upgrade is in progress...the failures are probably for precisely the same reason i mentioned above, the capacity overrun! O2 & Vodaphone has a capacity between 3-4K where they have 2 layer solutions, a direct delivery solution sitting int he front and the back end authordox SMSC which theya re still being paranoid to remove!

with a joint subs base of say 30-50M ....at times 7-8K MPS may not be enough to suppor the incoming SMS traffic! Hence, u get laggs!

I would look forward to Warid Pakistan to see how they perform as i beleive they are going full fledge next generation SMSC...and they have high throughput also!

I dont think we can go far on resolving this as each other will cover up for themselves ...and point the finger elsewhere!

My bad Ghazalie. I did missed the point.

Goks,

I hear you on the capacity part, but aren't we getting off-tangent with regards to the topic, mate? :D

As i said, we really need a good systems shake up in the IT infrastructure locally, but with rgds to the topic here, which is what probably happened that evening and how it came about... my point is, it was avoidable... even with whatever infra all 3 telco's have in place.

In this industry, where blaming technicalities (and by that technlogy) for every damn screw up, has become the norm, to the extent blinding ppl to basic economic factors at times. What was that saying, ahh yes... a good carpenter never blames his tools.. :D

You say direct delivery - its not a simple solution la. It gets complicated with the inter-mechanics of the wireless platform of each telco. And this needs to extend to the external CPs and apps. And the cost? Who's going to foot the bill for SMS upgrades bearing in mind the MMSC implementation/upgrades and 3G rollouts (which is pathetic at the moment by the way)? You're not trying to promote a Nordic solution now are ya? :D

How is it Akedemi Fantasia, that had close to a million transactions on 1 telco alone manage to cope with the load? Think about it for a moment...

One thing, when I mentioned tps in my messages about, its always downstream i.e. MTs. Not many telco's use MO as a barometer these days - if there are - you should be worried. It's the biggest mistake anyone can make in network planning. :D

Funny you're using subs base as your yardstick for lags.. ask you this, how many messaging channels can a LAPD handle? Translate that to T1 capacity. Translate that to BTS capacity. Translate that to Cell capacity. Translate that to frequency capacity (assuming FDH)... get the drift? Ohh and btw, this was basically the cause for the S'pore debacle you mentioned.. not poor SMSC's!! :D

Btw Goks, we can discuss this in more detail, when you decide to buy me them beers you owe me! :D *wink*

Jeff, sorry for getting a bit technical here and moving off the topic.

If what James says happened that night and quote, "I was at the Grand Finale. During the commercial break after Faizal's performance, comperes Awal and Marion were up on stage minutes before the show went on air again - with the results in hand! This was minutes before they announced that the voting had ended. What did this mean? That a decision had been made even before the votes had been cast?"

Thanks for telling James. The intrigue certainly deepens. Can we conclude that there is an element of fraud in the air? What do you think Jeff?

I watched the Grand Finale again from the website. Let's not doubt the ability of the contestants. All of them are good. What James brought up are good points. It was how the show and voting was managed that causes all the displeasures.

At the beginning of the show, the MC announced voters can cast their votes if they want their favourite to win. Ok, maybe the fans started to vote already, but those who really want to vote after they see the performance would hold on. Alif performed first. Then Suki. Lastly, Faisal. For Alif and Suki, there are ample time. After Faisal's performance, the MC announced the voting would be closed in a few minutes time. I noted there are about 5 minutes before commercial break (the break was less than 2 minutes), so there were only about 5 - 6 minutes for the voters who vote after they see his last performance, which was outstanding. If 8TV had extended the voting period, say insert a news break or something, the results would have been different. Or maybe should have done like what Malaysian Idol had done, vote after the show, fair for all contestants.

If 8TV wanted to plan the voting in such a way, the first thing they should make sure is the "tool" they are having can accomodate the traffic density within the last few minutes, which I think screwed up a bit there.

goks - "a good carpenter never blames his tools"

Correct, tools are dead stuffs, people are live. Its up to the people to decide the quality of tools they want to use. Lets summarise the parameters involved, i.e. Planner cum marketer (8Tv), carpenter (DAPAT, telcos), tools (SMS engine), finished product (SMS service outcome), and cost (consumers + sponsors's money). Now the carpenter is found to have tools that are not of the correct sizes, the quality of the work was affected. If the finished product is low in quality, the planner and carpenter should be jointly responsible to make sure the tools they are having are upgraded.

I think it's only fair for Faisal if 8TV made a guarantee on Faisal's future for the losses he faced due to the badly organised voting system. I think Faisal has a valid case to sue 8TV for compensation, but I think Faisal is a nice guy, won't sue one lah. So, 8TV... know what to do -lah!

From all the stirrings and discoveries here, I am wondering why 8TV has chosen to be silent on the matter. I can only assume but I am reminded never to assume. I would certainly like to hear it from a responsible TV station. I am also wondering if the other contestants are monitoring this blog and wondering themselves too.

Nav,

I dont promtoe any products, and i both and disagree with some of your comments.

Unless you got it wrong, direct delivery need not have anything to do with interoperating with telco's or CP's. Its just the capacity and capability of the SMSC solution the oprerator has within his own networks. You can achieve Direct delivery 2 ways, either through the MSC in the case of Nokia & Ericsson MSC(which i am sure of) and via the SMS solutiion itself. For MSC based direct routing, MO/MT traffic is delivered direct bypassing the SMSC. The MSC based direct delivery does not apply here as it will only help speed up P2P MO/MT SMS traffic. for 3PP traffic, the delivery has to route through the SMSC, thus direct delivery is implemented there (in the SMSC).

I also agree with you that the Core traffic has to dimension for the SMS load, on their STPs or media gateways to cope with the wireless transmission. I beg to differ that peak SMS traffic can and will be bottlenecked at the CORE! Its very very rare. IF it is, then the operator has extreamely poor CS-Core planning! From my experiance, you do see Core-bottleneck in 3rd world under developed and underplanned networks, not ever in Malaysia!

BTW, upgrading to direct delivery routing solution cost a fraction of what the operators make, as i mentioned, the business case will show that you re-coup your investment within a year if not 1.5 yrs, at the current SMS rates in Malaysia, regardless of which vendor you have. Alternatively, like Digi, you can seggragate SMSC traffic and run multiple SMSC for different usage.

For 3PP Apps such as voting, you need to route through the SMSC, then to an external 3PP application.Usually as u mentioned, the 3PP apps talk to a middleware, or CMP, either in native MM language or industry standard Parlay/Parlay X etc...am sure u are aware of it.!

So this is where the bottleneck can start, right from the TPS limitation on the SMSC or the Middleware! Of course, then you can also say there will be a lag between the middleware and 3PP apps, which probaby is linked via a direct internet connection to an external source like DAPAT!!

As with your comment, not many telco's use MO traffic into account for dimensioning, i seriously beg to differ my friend.
i guess if operator thought this way, we will have more bottleneck issues.

Tell me, if Peer to content messaging like Voting, MO or MT :) ???

MO right? So this is why you cannot forget about MO traffic. You only avoid MO traffic calculation for Peer to peer SMS, BUT you MUST count MO traffic for Peer to Content traffic :) ...habibi! dont forget this yeah...! If you forget this, you will have bottleneck when you run peer to content apps like voting, Video chat etc...!

As for your comment:
"Funny you're using subs base as your yardstick for lags.. ask you this, how many messaging channels can a LAPD handle? Translate that to T1 capacity. Translate that to BTS capacity. Translate that to Cell capacity. Translate that to frequency capacity (assuming FDH)... get the drift? Ohh and btw, this was basically the cause for the S'pore debacle you mentioned.. not poor SMSC's!! :D"

Buddy, i know you know allot, but stick to the basics and not confuse people. Its not funny to use subs base to study lags. SMSC's are dimensioned by subs base & traffic per sub. durign BH. If you need a sample of how it is dimensioned i'm more then happy to share!

And the BH traffic per sub defer from country to country, depending on how high the SMS usage is. Hence when you have large subs base with high BH usage, then ur dimensioningis much higher, u need higher capacity..so whats so funny?

I think before going down to BTS, and LAPD links ...i think you need to first look at the obvious start of the bottleneck...as i have told you, the traffic bottleneck very rarely...in fact hardly comes in the form of Core or Radio bottleneck ..its usually in the service layer itself! I would love to hear some reference if you found some bottlenecks for SMSC from the CORE, that operator needs an upgrade real soon :) if he's in asia, even better, tell me the operator name ...hahahaha

We can discuss this mroe detail, but stick to basics please ... i dont think its fair to blame toold coz it's humans that plan and dimension these!

To put it ina nutshell, they 8 TV program didnt dimension their solution for the kind of traffic they received, hence you see multiple bottleneck at various sources! But i can assume you that these bottleneck are from the service layer and above, not at all in the core or radio!

As for the singapore debacle, i dont know where you got your info from, but a direct reflection of the capacity issue the operator has put out a warning to 3PP apps to get written permission from them before any future natinowide voting apps and have upgraded their capacity. However, their capacity is still a fraction of what ppl like digi have! IN fact i love digi's seggregation architecture for SMS traffic, very well thought off!

Streetz,

Agreed, this should be awake up call for all future voting service providers and service purchasers to make sure:

1) The 3PP apps they hire have sufficient capacity to handle at least 3-5 MPS
2) The 3PP companies have suffcient SLA's with the operator to allocate the needed peak traffic from the different oeprators
3) MCMC comes up witha guidlelines where televoting companies must be certified with all oeprators, must declare their capacity and and must run a simulation of their capacity with each telco ...and this simulation can take place after midnight. Of course Operators may not be happy, but as long they get paid they wotn make noise!

This will make ppl plan their business offering better!

Nav,

My apologies, you brought up an interesting topic, on akademi fantasia, i missed that!

In fact i'm keen to know why and how it went well? Perhaps it had very good capacity planning...from the astro reports i read they saw something like 5M SMS's over 9 week period .... well this isnt high to me.

I just tried to do some calculation on a worst case scenario ..assuming 50% of traffic realized over a 24 Hr period ..thats ammounts about under 30MPS (28.9) ...which is actually low~ perhaps because it was done over a period of time ... unlike this one which was over 2 hours (i am assuming)

Hence coming to look at it, something must be seriously flawed in the 8TV voting system from Dapat for it to fail ..i am not sure how many votes they have counted for the game as i didnt follow the game show ...

Do you by any chance have further info on this?

Streetz, correction, should be 3-5K MPS. and this is only true if they expect 2-5M votes within a 1-2 hours of voting.

NAv,
Didnt AF start voting in the morning, till night...correct ah?