Malaysia’s YTL, which has built out a nationwide 4G network to help close the country’s digital divide, has also created what it says is the world’s first national education cloud that is deployed in all 10,080 primary and secondary schools in coordination with the government’s education transformation blueprint.

“Coupled with our national 4G footprint and our understanding of the synergies between mobile internet and cloud-based services, we have been able to accomplish something no one else has been able to achieve, and I’m excited to share what we have done at the Mobile World Congress,” said YTL group managing director Francis Yeoh Sock Ping (pictured).

Dr Yeoh is on a panel session this week (Tuesday) on Health & Education for Connected Citizens.

He said he is encouraged to see US President Obama’s ConnectED initiative and similar connected learning initiatives taken by countries such as Finland and South Korea. He noted that Malaysia is lucky to have a “progressive government that is bold enough” to drive this on a national scale.

While applications and content are important, Dr Yeoh said YTL prefers to take a broader approach where the entire end-to-end experience is crafted and optimised with the stakeholders in mind.

For example, with its 4G network, he said the company can offer anytime, anywhere learning. “But we have put in extra measures to create an VLAN-over-4G architecture to protect the children while they are connected. And we built a cloud-based learning platform, called Frog VLE (virtual learning environment), to create an intuitive experience for students, teachers and parents.”

In other words, “we believe that taking a holistic platform level approach is perhaps more important than throwing points solutions and see which one sticks”.

Many may think that by virtue of being in the telecommunications sector, YTL by definition is a technology business, he said. “But I’ve learnt that in the end, all businesses are about people. So we never take for granted any large-scale transformation effort — we must always consider change management. Simply put, we must help our stakeholders see for themselves the reason for change and be inspired and motivated to embrace the change because it is fundamentally good for them.”

Looking ahead, he said YTL aims to deliver better and more cost-effective 4G services and devices. “But we won’t stop there. We believe that our larger calling is to use mobile internet as a force of good to touch all walks of lives in Malaysia and beyond.”