Telekom Malaysia (TM) today has officially announced two major broadband deals that it has signed with the Government of Malaysia in the form of the High Speed Broadband Project Phase 2 (HSBB 2) and Sub-Urban Broadband Project (SUBB). Both of these projects will take place over the next 10 years and worth in total of RM 3.4 billion.
According to the announcement, the telecom giant will be investing RM 1.3 billion for HSBB 2 and RM 1 billion for SUBB while the Government will contribute RM 500 million and RM 600 million for respective projects. This means that the HSBB 2 and SUBB projects will cost RM 1.8 billion and RM 1.6 billion respectively.
In general, the HSBB 2 project is the continuation of the original HSBB project and will include the deployment of 95 additional HSBB-ready exchanges that will cover 390,000 premises by 2017. Additionally, the coverage of HSBB will also be expanded through this project which will now include additional state capitals, selected major towns, related industrial zones, and educational institutions.
Meanwhile, the SUBB project will be focusing on sub urban and rural areas. As part of the project, areas with copper lines will be upgraded to receive broadband speed of up to 20 Mbps while areas with Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) will also receive upgrades that will unlock speed of up to 100Mbps. More than 420,000 premises will be covered by these upgrades by 2019, according to TM.
Naturally, the last mile access network to homes and business under both projects will be provided by TM. In addition to FTTH, the roll out will also be utilizing several other technologies including Ethernet-to-the-Home, Very High Speed Digital Subscriber Line 2.
Judging from this announcement, it seems that more areas will be covered by UniFi high speed Internet services through HSBB 2 and SUBB projects within the next few years. However, the announcement is still quite general though and we pretty sure users that still not able to utilize the service would prefer to know the roll out date in their areas instead which we hope will happen as soon as possible.
(Source: TM via Bursa Malaysia. Image: iqa1309 @ Puncak Jalil Online Community, thundercats @ Klang Community Forum)
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