More than a year has passed since the government announced its plan to shut down the country’s 3G network as part of its Jalinan Digital Negara (JENDELA) plan. The move is meant to help improve the quality and performance of the country’s 4G network.
While the government and industry are pushing to complete the 3G sunset process by the end of 2021, telcos so far didn’t publicly share when and where exactly the shutdown would take place at a specific timeframe. That is not the case with Maxis though, who actually has published a detailed timeline of the sunset process on its website:
That being said, the story behind the existence of the schedule is rather intriguing. According to MalaysianWireless who first discovered it, Maxis mentioned the schedule on its Facebook page yesterday but somehow decided to take it down a few hours later.
Furthermore, the site also noted that the full sunset schedule was discovered pretty deep within Maxis’ website. We do agree one would expect such important information would be more visible to users instead of having them need to dig further into the website.
According to JENDELA’s third quarterly report , more than 900,000 users have been migrated to 4G while close to 40,000 3G carriers have been switched off by the end of May 2021. We expect the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) to provide further updates regarding the 3G sunset process in the next edition of JENDELA’s quarterly report which will be released later this month.
(Source: Maxis via MalaysianWireless. Image: lemoncat1 / Flickr.)
