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…
As for broadband, they plan to spend RM150 million to deploy a HSDPA network in the Klang Valley, Penang (by October 2006), and Johor (by end 2006). The article goes on to state that Maxis is targeting its broadband service at existing dial up internet users. I hope this doesn’t mean that they don’t intend to compete with Streamyx - does it mean that they’ll only service areas that Streamyx doesn’t cover?
RM700 million would be used over the next three years to further roll out broadband services. Their CEO, Datuk Jamaludin Ibrahim, also mentioned that “The advantage of HSDPA is that internet access is not only possible in high-speed 3G areas, but also across our entire 3G and EDGE coverage”.
Here’s the bad news:
Numerically, Package speed is very dissapointing though - RM68 for 384Kbps and RM98 for 768Kbps. Especially when Streamyx is offering 1Mbps and 2Mbps packages. And they have that whole “best effort” nonsense that Streamyx is playing as well - which means that they are legally only required to provide you 65% to less than half of the speed promised. However, the less than half speed (150Kbps) is only for areas with only EDGE coverage.
It gets worse…Maxis Broadband “Fair Usage Policy” - Fair For Maxis, maybe.
Despite the new spending, it seems like the 3GB Monthly Bandwidth for upload and download usage limitation will still be in place (you can write a written request to use more bandwidth though, haha!) , as well as the “no service level guarantee” for users of P2P services , and the fact that they state they that can and will pass over your details over to the authorities if requested to do so. This is the best one - they can automatically disconnect you if they choose to - read this:
“Maxis may, at its sole discretion, automatically disconnect the customer’s internet session after a period of inactivity, which may vary from 20 minutes to 30 minutes. This automatic disconnection is to allow maximum network performance.”
Despite the ridiculous terms of service, their coverage ambitions actually seem feasible due to the fact that they are not limited by physical infrastructure (such as DSLAMs, fibre optics and copper cables) like TIME or TMNet Streamyx, since they are going to ride on existing mobile networks as well as wireless facilities.
Let’s hope it works for the sake of the people without any broadband coverage or internet access at all, but let’s also hope they rethink their terms of service, especially the 3GB limit. The whole point of broadband is to access high bandwidth, rich content and sites like Youtube.com, podcasts, and photo galleries, not just use it to check e-mail and read news. That’s like only using your Ferrari to drive to the grocery shop.
Josh Lim
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