Contents - Connect-World

National Development
crucial if we are to maintain our competitive
edge in an Internet savvy
global market.
Malaysias broadband penetration
rate today is less than one per cent;
this is a stumbling block to the development
of future technologies and an
information-based society, ready to
compete in the global economy.
Affordable broadband is essential to
narrowing the digital divide and
enriching the lives of citizens with
applications such as e-health, e-transactions,
e-education and e-recreation.
The development of Malaysias
telecommunications infrastructure
calls for a high- priority national project
to encourage further investment in
broadband and facilitate Internet
deployment. Accordingly, the government
formulated its National
Broadband Plan to stimulate the rollout
of nationwide access to broadband
communications services by fostering
a supportive relationship with the private
sector.
Technology neutrality
The government favours technological
flexibility and inter-operability to create
an environment that thrives on
pro-competition policies and prudent
infrastructure investment. This will
ensure that market forces will prevail
and spur the investment and innovation
needed to meet the needs of consumers
and stakeholders.
Technology neutrality helps maximise
the speed of rollout, and faster, cheaper,
access.
As outlined in the Communications
and Multimedia Act of 1998, technological
neutrality permits operators to
freely choose and mix technologies to
serve user needs. This helps to minimise
cost and maximise operating
efficiency, narrowing the market efficiency
gap.
Nevertheless, a degree of standardisation
is needed to ensure equipment
inter-operability.
Quality of Service (QoS)
Instituting a minimum quality of service
standard is essential to ensure that
services meet user requirements and
provide value for money. Consumer
awareness and discernment needs to
be raised not only in regards to quality
of service, but also to high-speed
Internet access.
“The government and
private sector need to
provide consumers and
businesses alike with the
necessary communications
services at acceptable
quality and price.”
Last mile bottlenecks
Deployment efforts are thwarted by
last mile connection bottlenecks.
Government intervention, by instituting
an interconnection and peering
regime and creating a transparent
legal and regulatory framework to
ensure continuous operating efficiency,
can remove roadblocks to investment
in broadband deployment.
Demand and supply aggregation
A concerted effort, by both the government
and private sector, is needed to
stimulate aggregate demand and supply
so that broadband connections can
reach critical mass.
Mass-market applications, as with
online games in Korea, hit the threshold
of critical mass and accordingly
stimulate demand for fast, high capacity
broadband. Thus, to catalyse the
aggregation of supply and demand,
there needs to be wide-scale promotion
of the usage of applications for
the public and businesses. Towards
this end, the National Broadband Plan
serves to start aggregating demand
amongst various communities, the
private sector and home users.
Communities include government
departments, schools, universities,
research institutions, hospitals and
clinics, libraries and community
centres.
The e-government network will connect
all e-government applications to
“TheMalaysian
Government has established
clear policies
regarding the digital
divide, based on the
principles of availability,
accessibility and affordability.”
about 84,000 terminals in 900
departments at Federal, State and
District levels. Schoolnet will provide
all 10,000 schools in the country with
broadband connections. The Smart
School curriculum will be available on
the web at these schools. With
Schoolnet, the distinction between
Smart Schools, urban schools and
rural schools should be greatly
reduced. Malaysia Research and
Education Network (MYREN) is a network
of research institutions and
institutions of higher learning.
The network will be operational at the
end of this year with 12 major universities
of Malaysia on-board. Upon stabilisation,
other research entities
would be taken on-board. MYREN
would be connected to external
resources and partner networks in
Europe, East Asia and other countries
to exploit the fullest benefits for our
R&D entities.
Other broadband networks such as the
telehealth network, telecentres network,
the library network and private
networks will join the national broadband
network. The government aims
to create a critical mass; a penetration
rate of five per cent by the year 2006
and ten per cent by 2008, to attract
industry players to rollout last mile
infrastructure, including to domestic
users.
In the industrial sector, incentives will
be given to small and medium scale
enterprises (SMEs) to make greater
usage of ICT, to produce goods with
higher added value and to venture into
new areas using cutting edge
technologies.
The thrust of this strategy is to spur
domestic investment in SMEs. SMEs
are encouraged to invest in ICT and
upgrade their technology through tax
rebates/relief, grants and by facilitating
R&D and R&D commercialisation.
The government has endeavoured to
improve access to financing and seed
capital as well as increased allocation
of government-administered soft
loans for these purposes.
Narrowing the digital divide
The digital divide is a socio-economic
problem caused by unequal access to
ICT for obtaining and leveraging
information/knowledge within a society.
Lack of physical access, lack of IT
literacy, lack of suitable content, or the
high cost of access can cause this. The
Malaysian Government has established
clear policies regarding the
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