LTE technology in Malaysia (news)

In year 2010
According to the news in year 2010, the Malaysian government is expected to release 9 blocks of spectrum for 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) to 9 players soon.

There will be,

• 4 Mobile telcos - Celcom, DiGi, Maxis & U-mobile 
• 4 WiMAX operators - AMAX, P1, REDtone & YTL
• A new comer

The 9 companies have been informed via fax that they have been allocated the 2.6GHz spectrum for 4G LTE use. This will only take effect on 1st January 2013 which is a long way to go, and time is something that the players need to roll out commercially. Each of them will be getting 20MHz block of the spectrum.

2 years (2010 - 2012) should give the players sufficient head start to evaluate vendors, conduct trials and plan out their coverage expansion. By 2013, we should have more 4G LTE devices in the market.

In year 2011

According to the news in year 2011, Malaysia is ready to move its mobile broadband to the next generation platform by adopting the third-generation (3G) long-term evolution (LTE) technology anytime in the near future.

Leslie Shannon (Senior Market Consultant Nokia Siemens Network) said Malaysian telecommunication carriers have experienced a high mobile broadband usage demand among their customer base, thus, adopting the LTE should not be a problem.

She also added that carriers are looking towards the next generation that would have far greater bandwidth and, the LTE offers that promise. Other than that, local telecommunication companies are very smart in fixing the pricing and marketing being right.

She also said that Malaysia, after the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission grants licenses to telco companies to kick start the LTE technology, will join the group of nations which are already feeling its success, such as the United States, Finland and Uzbekistan.

The LTE, as the most efficient mobile broadband technology, provides excellent user experience. This is through an extremely fast broadband experience and is defined for more frequency bands than any other.

It can be used on paired and unpaired spectrum allocations making it a truly global standard.

In year 2012

Since December 2011, DiGi has begun a network upgrade of epic proportions. 
 

The upgrade is expected to continue through 2012 and within this period DiGi targets to upgrade over 400 sites a month on average. Once completed, a total of over 5,000 DiGi sites will have been upgraded. 

DiGi says its “Tomorrow Network” will be Malaysia’s first LTE-equipped network by the end of 2012. At the same time the upgraded network will also expand existing EDGE and 3G coverage to 95.8% of the Malaysian population. In addition, DiGi also promises a more stable and environmentally friendly network once the year round upgrade is completed.

In this respect, Yes did an amazing job with its WiMAX network covering over 60% of the populated areas in West Malaysia from day one. What Yes did is a hard act to follow but it is not impossible and we’re pretty sureDiGi is aware of this. So we’re expecting DiGi’s LTE footprint to be considerable so that it will be practical.