by Dr Raph Azrin

Created on: September 27, 2009

The Malaysian Government injected over RM400 Million into the infrastructure of the internet infrastructure under the 9th Malaysia Plan to facilitate the Knowledge Based Economy and to boost education standard.However, this is far less than the US$9 Billion spent by the city state of Singapore to bring the broadband to 100Mbps speeds. In comparison, it's far from the required amount needed to boost the exisiting infrastructure in Malaysia for high speed internet. And when we say High Speed Internet, speeds over 10 Mbps are expected.

In Malaysia, there are 3 camps in the broadband industry, namely the wired, wireless and the cellular. The incumbent Telekom Malaysia controls the Wired Broadband although MAXIS also provides Landlines to the residential areas in Kuala Lumpur via fiber optic POTS Splitters. The existing speed is said to be 1.0 Mbps and in some areas near the telephone exchange are lucky enough to be served with 4Mbps. However, plain ADSL stops there despite the e-Metro services in the high density commercial areas providing up to 10Mbps to offices using dedicated SDSL system or fiber optic system.

Then we have the cellular operators providing 3G and HSDPA connections through either the mobile phone or a dedicated modem in major areas of Malaysia and where full coverage is not possible, falls back into EDGE or even the low end GPRS technology. Although it's a very much controversial, the incumbent TM Touch (now Celcom Mobile denominated as MY CELCOM in the mobile phones) holds the largest network coverage of 92% in the peninsular Malaysia literally piggy backing on existing infrastructure points and towers that are made available to Telekom Malaysia, their parent company and as the saying goes, where ever you see a phone line going through, you will get reception. Although Celcom holds the number of licenses including CDMA, UMTS, GSM and AMPS, these technologies are now put into GSM and W-CDMA with TDMA allocated to Telekom Malaysia where phone lines are not economically feasable to be fitted to the location due to the remote density of the customer. This is found in border areas of Kedah, Perak and Kelantan and in certain areas where the exploration camps are concentrated (FELDA and FELCRA areas included).

MAXIS being the major competitor from CELCOM, had been in business since 1980s through Binariang 012 has the second largest coverage in the GSM and PCN system after they bought over TimeCel. With 3G coverage in most cities, the biggest threat

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