That’s a lot of money…

And this is rather good news, actually. Even Energy, Water & Communications Minister Datuk Seri Lim Keng Yaik (center), who’s usually known for criticizing telcos and broadband providers here, is happy and giving the thumbs up, judging from the picture. Maxis is going to spend damn a lot of cash on expanding its 3G network and broadband. This big amounts, of course come with big targets - on the 3G front, they aim to cover 60% of the country’s population by 2009.

Some facts on the numbers:

Maxis current subscribers are 150,000. The population of Malaysia, according to The Department of Statistics is 26,774,352, so 60% of the country is 560,237 people. The increase from 150,000 to 560,237 is 3.73 times. Which means, in 3 years time, they are aiming to nearly quadruple their number of 3G subscribers. Read more for some good news and bad news: What they plan to do with the money, and their unfair terms of service for their broadband users…
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Evidently, some of you were dissapointed that I chose to highlight the goodie bag first. Honestly, I think it was something they did well which they should be congratulated for, and it was something interesting I could prepare on short notice. The rest of this report required making sense of notes hastily scribbled. This report covers information prepared by TMNet that was presented at the Klang Valley Streamyx User Group meeting on September 15th 2006.

The TMNet people did give a detailed presentation, with more information than I actually thought they would reveal. However, they stopped short of giving out the slides.

Luckily, I can write fast and take decent notes. However, I can only verify the accuracy of these data as much as I have faith in my visual processing and note taking abilities. Some shots of the original handwritten notes are included for verification or scrutiny. Where in doubt, I have ommitted putting in whatever I wasn’t too sure of or didn’t remember. However, I hope that someone exceptionally skilled in this kind of thing might be able to decipher what I have more comprehensively (contact me for the full scans). Or perhaps TMNet will send me the slides…but I highly doubt it, nor will you see this on their website.Â

Click more to read about statistics TMNet might not like you to see! (more…)

Hello RedesignMalaysia.com visitor,

Good News: Josh Lim, project director of RedesignMalaysia.com will be appearing on NTV7’s The Breakfast Show, hosted by Nazrudin Habibur Rahman (Naz), Daphne Iking and Shareena Mohd Hatta on Monday, 25th September 2006, 8AM-10AM. (No idea yet what time exactly the segment will be). He’ll be talking about RedesignMalaysia.com, why he started the website, the idea behind the site, how it’s been going so far and what are the future plans for the website.

Bad News: We don’t have VCRs or DVD Burners connected to our televisions.We need some help from you: Is it possible for someone here to volunteer to record the show? Better still if you can use do TV capture from your PC. Please leave a comment or e-mail us. Thanks!

On a side note, we’re pretty excited as this will be the first time the site is in the mainstream media, not just online, as the site, and our objectives would be exposed to a much wider audience. In addition, over the next month or so, there will be several features on RedesignMalaysia.com in a few publications, the interviews have already been done. Stay tuned!

The first part in our review of the Klang Valley Streamyx User Group Meeting, held at PJ Hilton on the 15 September 2006. Firstly, we’ll like to congratulate Streamyx for providing a great goodie bag. This is the first part of a series, further coverage will be posted out throughout the next few days.

Click to read more about what you got have gotten, and some things that happened during the event…

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Interesting news - Maxis announced the launch of broadband services for homes on the 15th of September. Â It appears to be a combination of 3G, HSDPA (High Speed Data Packet Access), and EDGE (Data rate for GSM Evolution). Service will presumably be best in the designated High Speed 3G areas (exact areas not announced yet). Prices will be revealed September 26.

It all seems like pretty good news - however from the looks of things, isn’t it already launched?

So it seems that the service has already previously launched? Let’s hope this new “relaunch” also signals a change in service quality, not just a push to get more subscribers and profits? Judging by the headline in The Star, does it also signal that they have previously launched (since early 2005), but they’re only set (as in properly prepared, finally ready)Â to launch it for real now? I guess we’ll see what happens over the next few months…

We’ve made even more changes to the map, adding in AirZed WiMax and eB Technologies MyWave. Yes, the shapes are really that odd (at least that’s what we’ve managed to get from their site). Chances are that they cover slightly more, but it was cropped off from the map, so we’ve transposed it exactly as shown on the site. You can see the original coverage pages at the following urls: AirZed WiMax Coverage and eB Technologies MyWave.

Any suggestions on who we should add next? In general, we aim to list the providers with the most significant coverage first, followed by the rest.

We’ve updated the coverage map to include coverage for Celcom 3G and Maxis 3G. Click on the respective tab to turn it on. Looking forward to your comments on service performance and which area you’re in (eg - is the service satisfactory in the places covered, are there coverage areas missing, etc) - remember, this is in the context of internet connectivity via 3G Card to a laptop/PC, not through a 3G phone.

Since we only cover Klang Valley at the moment, this is worth a note: In terms of overall coverage, Maxis has wider urban coverage (Klang Valley), however, Celcom has wider nationwide coverage across Malaysia (Peninsular Malaysia, Sabah, Sarawak). You can verify this by looking at the full coverage areas at their respective sites : Celcom 3G and Maxis 3G.

On an irrelevant note, now that we’ve got more colors…turning on all the coverage areas has a rather artistic “modern art” feel to it. Try it for yourself…

In news that isn’t really surprising for anyone who’s ever tried to call TMNet’s Customer Care Line, a recent article in the New Straits Times, written by the Malaysian Association of Standards Users reports that:

In closing, the article summarizes that its high time that providers pull up their socks, and that companies should be aware of corporate social responsibility to their consumers. We would agree.

Read the full article on The New Straits Times