Telekom Malaysia to upgrade 400 exchanges under RM3.4bil high-speed broadband rollout plan
PETALING JAYA, Nov 8: Telekom Malaysia Bhd (TM) will upgrade as many as 400 exchanges nationwide under the country’s RM3.4bil phase two high-speed broadband rollout referred to as HSBB2.
TM group chief executive officer Tan Sri Zamzamzairani Mohd Isa (pic) said the company would implement this as soon as possible, and that TM had converted about 103 exchanges into the next generation network under the successfully completed first phase.
“HSBB2 is an extension of that and an additional 95 exchange areas would be converted into this next generation network. Our commitment is to complete this over a period of three years,” he said at the launch of TM’s three latest initiatives, My1Hub, Iskandar International Gateway (IIGW), and its first privately-owned submarine cable system, Cahaya Malaysia.
The HSBB2 plan consists of two parts under Budget 2014, of which RM1.8bil would be spent on expanding coverage in mainly urban areas, where the Internet speed would be increased to 10 megabits per second (Mbps). This would be made available to 2.8 million households nationwide.
Another RM1.6bil has been allocated to expand the HSBB to suburban areas, with the Internet access speed increasing to between four and 10 Mbps.
“At the moment, we are still discussing with the Government,” he said when asked how much TM would be spending to upgrade the infrastructure.
TM currently owns and manages the existing HSBB network, which it began constructing in 2008 in an RM11.3bil public-private partnership agreement with the Government.
Zamzamzairani also said the company would continue to invest in infrastructure whenever capacity needed to be upgraded.
Of the three initiatives launched yesterday, My1Hub is expected to provide a neutral platform for service providers and data centre players to enhance their offerings to end-users by leveraging on TM’s extensive infrastructure. The My1Hub nodes are also pre-wired domestically to the cable landing stations at a high capacity bandwidth, which, in turn, leads to shorter service delivery.
TM has also established the IIGW to ensure the network infrastructure in Iskandar Malaysia would be able to cater to the demand for vast growth of data and services with high speeds of up to 10 gigabits per second (Gbps).
The IIGW connects Nusajaya directly to its four cable landing stations in Malacca, Mersing, Kuantan and Kuala Muda, giving direct and the shortest distance connectivity to international hubs in London, Hong Kong and Singapore.
Supporting all these will be its own submarine cable system, Cahaya Malaysia, which provides immediate 560 Gbps connectivity between Malaysia and Japan and Hong Kong with up to 6.4 terabits per second as its designed capacity.
The submarine cable spans 7,800km and was built in 2011 in collaboration with Japan’s NTT Communications Corp, the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co and Singapore’s StarHub.
source: The Star
