Telcos given 6 months for full coverage.
Telecommunication companies are given a six-month
deadline beginning May 1 to have a 100 per cent coverage of
Kuala Lumpur, Putrajaya and Cyberjaya areas, Energy, Water and
Communication Minister, Datuk Seri Dr Lim Keng Yaik said Friday.
The service providers are also given until the
end of 2005 to give full coverage throughout the nation, he told
reporters after launching Time dotCom’s Wireless Enhanced
Broadband Internet Service or Webbit, here.
“There are about 11 million mobile phone users in
Malaysia and how many of them are totally connected in the
country?” he said, adding that even Kuala Lumpur, Putrajaya and
Cyberjaya are not well connected.
“I do not want to see any blind spots in these
areas,” Dr Lim said. To provide full coverage, the Minister said
the service providers could either build new transmission
towers, domestic inter-roaming or share transmission towers.
“If not, let others build the transmission
equipment and force the service providers to use it with a
price,” he said.
Currently, there are three telecommunication
service providers in Malaysia namely, Maxis, Celcom and DiGi.
Dr Lim said the service providers needed to
further invest in base stations in order for the people to use
the services.
He said he has spoken to the Malaysian
Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) on the issue.
MCMC chairman Datuk V. Danapalan was present at the function.
Dr Lim said if the suggestion was not taken
seriously by telcos, he would seek MCMC’s and drastic actions
could be taken.
Asked whether the telco’s would be fined or their
licences revoked, he said it would be a combination of both or
otherwise.
“I leave it to the regulator to talk to them and
recommend to me the best solution,” he said. He said that the
Cabinet had been pressuring the Ministry on the issue in many of
the its meetings.
However, this deadline does not apply to wireless
broadband service providers as the users are very little but
warned that such problems should not prevail.
Dr Lim said the Ministry would come up with a
pricing benchmark for new service providers who need to use the
current telecommunications infrastructure.
“We need to have a balance between those who put
in the infrastructure and those who are interested to use it,”
he said.
He said the Ministry was keeping track with those
Internet service providers as there were so many now.
“They get the money upfront but don’t provide the
service. We have to regulate this,” he added.
On the progress of information and communications
technology (ICT) industry, he said overall it had been
satisfactory.
“However, if we look into the current
subscription of broadband services by Malaysians, there is still
much to be done in terms of access and consumer use of the
available technology,” he said.
Based on the statistics by the MCMC, as at end of
February 2004, there were only 125,547 Malaysians subscribing to
broadband services and the penetration rate was only at 0.5 per
cent, which is far behind compared to Singapore and South Korea.
As of June 2003, the penetration rate based on
total households Singapore was 31 per cent while South Korea the
penetration rate was 75 percent. “This is a major challenge in
view that broadband technology is an enabler that can propel our
country’s economic progress,” he said.
Broadband technology enables multiple
applications both for individual and business use. These include
using voice over broadband, Internet, television or video and
audio applications.
For businesses, broadband technology offers among
other things, web hosting, e-mail hosting and Files Transfer
Protocol facilities, he said.
Hence, he urged telecommunication companies to
take proactive steps so as to enable the general public to
readily adapt to this latest technology.
He said TIME’s Wireless Broadband Access service,
or Webbit, was viewed as one of the key elements in penetrating
the broadband market, as it provided an alternative solution
effectively.
