We first heard of CONNECTme back in 2018 which is essentially a satellite broadband service delivered by MEASAT, the same company that is responsible for providing the satellite platform for Astro. Fast forward to 2021, there is now more than 2,000 CONNECTme NOW sites across Malaysia according to MEASAT’s COO, Yau Chyong Lim.
A bulk of them is located in Sarawak with 1,183 sites to date while 243 sites are currently in operation within Sabah with the rest scattered throughout Peninsular Malaysia. Yau said that these sites, which are mainly located in areas not covered by 4G or fibre connectivity, are serving over 200,000 broadband connections.
However, the company is currently working to increase the number of CONNECTme NOW sites to 3,000 in order to achieve 300,000 connections by the end of this year according to Yau. At the same time, MEASAT is also planning to expand its CONNECTme NOW service to unconnected areas in other countries within Southeast Asia.
Meanwhile, MEASAT is also busy preparing to launch MEASAT-3d which is expected to take place in early 2022. The new Airbus-made satellite will not only help the company recover the missing capacity caused by the retirement of MEASAT-3 but would also allow CONNECTme to deliver a higher broadband speed of up to 100Mbps. At the same time, the company also expects that the new satellite to cover 100% of the unconnected population in Malaysia.
(Source: MEASAT. Images: CONNECTme / Facebook.)
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