KUALA LUMPUR, Dec 18 – Telekom Malaysia Bhd (TM) and the Government will invest RM3.4bil to delivery high speed broadband which they will first to invest RM1.8bil to implement the second phase of the High Speed Broadband Project (HSBB 2) spanning 10 years.
“There were 95 additional exchanges under the HSBB 2 will be HSBB ready providing access to 390,000 premises by 2017. Besides extending additional access and core capacity covering state capitals and selected major towns, they will also to invest another RM1.6bil in the Sub-Urban Broadband Project (SUBB), which will also be rolled out over 10 years,” said TM in a statement on Thursday.
The government will be investing RM500 million in HSBB2, while TM will fork out the remaining RM1.3 billion of the cost. As for the SUBB project, TM said the infrastructure will also be rolled out over 10 years, with the government will fund RM600mil and TM will spend RM1bil, to provide high-speed broadband access to over 420,000 premises by 2019. This had also involves the upgrading existing copper lines to deliver the high-speed broadband access speeds of up to 20Mbps and also up to 100Mbps in areas deployed with fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) technology.
TM said it had signed two public-private partnership (PPP) agreements with the Government to implement HSBB 2 and SUBB to deploy the access and domestic core networks to deliver an end-to-end broadband network infrastructure and services, as well as increasing coverage for the nation. Recall that TM had, on Feb 25, announced that it had accepted the letters of award from the government for the implementation of both the HSBB2 and SUBB.
HSBB 2 will see the expansion of the previous HSBB infrastructure, covering other priority economic areas including state capitals, selected major towns, including passing industrial zones throughout the country, passing public universities, institutions of higher education (Institut Pengajian Tinggi Awam or IPTAs), private institutions of higher education (Institut Pengajian Tinggi Swasta or IPTS), matriculation colleges and other Government colleges.
The SUBB project, on the other hand, will cover sub-urban and rural areas, passing public universities, IPTAs, IPTS, matriculation colleges and other Government colleges. TM will roll-out last mile access network for both HSBB 2 and SUBB projects to homes and businesses utilising FTTH, Ethernet-to-the-home (ETTH) and Very High Speed Digital Subscriber Line 2 (VDSL2) technologies. To date, TM had deployed UniFi to 103 TM exchange areas nationwide, covering 1.769 million premises.
“The HSBB 2 and SUBB are set to benefit not only the consumers, but also Malaysian businesses as we will be able to provide Malaysians with world class network infrastructure and super fast connectivity, boosting the development of ICT-related industries towards fulfilling government’s aspiration of elevating Malaysia into a high-income nation,” said TM group chief executive officer Tan Sri Zamzamzairani Mohd Isa in the same statement.
