High-speed broadband dreams live on
- HSBB issuer in Pahang geared up to enlarge to Johor
- ISPs are seeing the value of its open community
While inside the starting, around 2008, he had even audaciously attempted to turn out to be the primary participant for the nationwide rollout of HSBB on the price of Telekom Malaysia (TM), nowadays he has accepted that there's still a commercial enterprise case to roll out HSBB in areas now not served through TM.
He has absolutely put his money wherein his mouth is and has sunk in an estimated RM30 million (US$9.6 million) into constructing an HSBB community in the city of Kuantan, within the state of Pahang, for starters. The network has been rolled out in degrees beginning 2010 and these days he has clients like Jaring and Celcom leasing his community to sell their services to stop clients. He has simply signed with Packet One International (P1).
The reassuring part for Heikal is that his customers at the moment are pushing him to roll his network out more aggressively, as a way to promote to more clients and businesses.
“That is a fantastic signal,” he says. “The industry appreciates us and is aware of our price proposition.”
That fee lies in Jalenas’ business model of being an open network to all Internet Service Providers to use, and additionally to content material gamers.
Heikal (percent) plans to increase the beauty of Jalenas to content material providers through building its very own set-top field to turn out to be an open media platform for all content carriers to utilize. “Consumers will no longer need to have a couple of set-top container of their homes, and we're positioning ours to be the preferred preference for areas in which we've got HSBB insurance.”
In fact, while the preliminary rollout in Kuantan was focused on commercial enterprise regions, considering that February Jalenas has extended to patron regions too. While laying cable may be sluggish and high priced, a new technique known as micro trenching dramatically reduces the time and prices of laying the all critical fiber into the floor.
However the vulnerability of the cables being reduce accidently by way of production paintings and different civil works is still there.
Not content material with that, his crew has already labored out the planning and network design for the same rollout in three municipalities within the southern kingdom of Johor. When rolled out, it will give him a total of 500,000 premises handed in the state.
The goal this yr is 80,000 premises exceeded with 15,000 in Kuantan and the rest in Johor Baru, the state capital.
Heikal suffered a setback lately when the monetary group he changed into counting on for the financing he needed to enlarge his community, pulled out. But in proper entrepreneur style he has conquer that and is working with a syndicate of three banks to offer him the RM1 billion (US$320 million) he needs to move towards his dream of presenting low priced broadband to all Malaysians.
“I can see it. I can feel it. This has traction now. It will happen,” he says.