Two of the country’s biggest telco, Celcom and DiGi today have signed a long-term deal with TM to utilize the company’s backhaul network which is called TM Next-Gen Backhaul Services. Through this deal, both telcos will be leasing bandwidth from TM who delivered it through their fibre infrastructure in order to help Celcom and DiGi cater to the ever increasing demand from consumers.
Specifically, TM Next-Gen Backhaul Services will be responsible in delivering bandwidth connectivity to aggregation and access sites that are jointly owned by Celcom and DiGi throughout Peninsular Malaysia which covers the distance of 3000 to 3500 km. Both telcos pointed out that this new deal is a continuation of the existing collaboration that they signed in 2011 to jointly roll out more than 10000km of fibre network nationwide.
Said to be in effect for more than 10 years, the first phase of this new collaboration between the three companies will apparently take place from 2014 to 2016. Second phase of the collaboration will follow suit right after that which will involves the deployment of additional sites across Peninsular Malaysia.
For Celcom and DiGi, this deal is not only about meeting the increasing demand from consumers in a cost-effective manner for both companies but also to help them increase the quality of their services across the border including data and voice. That sounds really promising indeed especially of recent complaints from consumers and MCMC but to be frank, I believe we will only able to see the effectiveness of this deal once the actual work is implemented.
At the same time, the Group CEO of TM, Tan Sri Zamzamzairani have stated that their existing consumer services such as Unifi and Streamyx will not be affected by this new deal between the three companies as TM’s infrastructure have the ample capacity for future expansion and increased demand from customers.
