1 July 2009
Filed in Point-to-multipoint
In a new report by Pyramid Research (www.pyr.com) it has been suggested that Malaysia’s Mobile Broadband demand is growing faster than expected. (Download excerpt here) Having lived in Malaysia for 3 years now, and also being an early adopter of HSPA for mobile broadband, I have personally seen major demand for mobile and home wireless broadband, driven partly by consumers looking for an alternative to Telekom Malaysia, who are the incumbent and have a near monopoly share of last mile fixed broadband connections. With the four 3G operators (Maxis, Celcom, DiGi, and U-Mobile) aggressively competing with each other for business, consumers are enjoying a variety of mobile and home wireless broadband packages at very reasonable prices.
The PYR report further suggests that Mobile penetration has reached 98% in 2008 which is double the regional penetration of 47%, and that we could expect to see mobile data services accounting for 45% of an operators revenue by 2014. The main issue that operators have today is the cost effective backhaul of this exponentially growing data whilst maintaining their margins in a competitive market.
Due to the lack of cheap and quality fixed line infrastructure in Malaysia, the dominant backhaul solution for the operators continues to be Microwave. Even Celcom who were previously owned by the incumbent Telekom Malaysia, runs its own national Microwave network for the backhaul of its 2G and 3G cell sites. HSPA speeds on today’s networks in Malaysia have reached 14.4Mbps and operators have a roadmap to 28.8Mbps by the end of 2009. With faster speeds on the RAN, an increase in cell sites to provide umbrella HSPA coverage, and the introduction of IP enabled 3G NodeB’s, operators are being forced to redesign their current last mile and core transmission networks to cope with the current and future requirements.
In dense urban areas such as the Klang Valley, Penang, and Johor Bahru operators are starting to look at alternative technologies which support TDM and IP, and are more scalable, spectrally efficient, cost efficient, and take up less mast space compared to traditional technologies such as point-to-point microwave. This has prompted operators to consider point-to-multipoint as a solution for backhaul. Maxis have been using a 10.5GHz VectaStar PMP network for the backhaul of some of the heaviest cellular traffic sites in Kuala Lumpur since 2007 with great success. The recent news that the local regulator, MCMC, has awarded five 28MHz 10.5GHz licenses means that there will be further PMP deployments in 2009 for the backhaul of these next generation cellular networks. It will be interesting to see how the transmission networks evolve which will include PMP networks to meet the demands of the operators and enable the growth of Mobile Broadband over the next 5 years.
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