Malaysia’s newly elected prime minister Anwar Ibrahim revealed plans to review the previous administration’s 5G plan, which could hinder the deployment of 5G in the country after operators finally agreed on deals with state-owned agency Digital Nasional Berhad (DNB).
Anwar said: "It needs to be reviewed because it was not done in a transparent manner," without providing further details.
The new government had stated it would not roll back some of the previous decisions made by its predecessor, however, these were not detailed.
Under the previous administration of Muhyiddin Yassin, the government unveiled DNB in 2021, a state-owned agency which owns all 5G spectrums with the idea being it will evenly distribute airwaves in a fair and affordable manner to accelerate 5G deployment, in place of the auction method employed by the majority of nations.
The radical idea saw much pushback from operators over concerns about how the rollout would be implemented. But eventually, almost all operators came on board (with the exception of Maxis), taking equal shares in DNB and 10-year spectrum licenses.
