Malaysia has been working towards a clear national objective to see it ranked as a fully developed nation by the year 2020.
This Vision 2020 was a concept introduced by the former Prime Minister Mr Mahathir in 1991 when he launched the Sixth Malaysia Plan.
The task of building an advanced telecom sector has strong relevance to achieving this national objective, reports Research and Markets. It has also been a matter of national pride. For a period in the 1990s the country was busy promoting itself as a regional high technology hub.
In recent times, however, it has adopted a quieter profile and simply gone about the task of putting what might be described as a technologically progressive economy in place. With the widespread application of modern technologies such as fibre optics, wireless transmission, digitalisation and satellite services, Malaysia has been steadily moving towards achieving its national goals.
The developmental effort in the telecom sector has been led by a booming mobile market with almost 45 million subscribers and a penetration approaching 150% by late 2013. Although subscriber growth has slowed somewhat in recent years, a major move by the operators into mobile broadband has seen vigorous growth in the market, with strengthening ARPUs. The momentum is certain to be maintained with the issue of multiple 4G/LTE licences in late 2012 and the initial launch of a series of advanced mobile broadband networks during 2013.
The adoption of broadband internet has been the big news in Malaysia over the last few years. Finally the long awaited surge in internet demand had arrived, this happening after a period of slower than expected development. High speed broadband first started to take off in 2008; by late 2013 there were over six million broadband subscribers with two-thirds of these being wireless based.
The arrival of wireless broadband offerings saw these technologies overwhelm a market previously dominated by Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) technology. Telekom Malaysia had been the dominant broadband service provider. This was being seriously challenged as the market opened up and mobile broadband became more widespread.
