The Malaysian Insight

TELCO provider YTL Communications, which runs the YES internet network, today launched in George Town the first large-scale pilot of the Terragraph high-speed broadband in Asia,  

Malaysia is the second country to host a Terragraph trial,  after Hungary in the town of Mikebuda, which boosts internet speeds of 5Mbps to 650Mbps.

The Terragraph project is supported by Facebook who introduced the technology in 2016 to bring gigabit speeds to support growing data demand of urban residents and visitors and boost smart city services.

The trial involving public wifi and fixed wireless access will run for six months, and is free for all participants such as city business operators and residents, the telco said.

YTL chief executive officer Wing K Lee said in the past, to leapfrog from megabyte to gigabyte speeds entailed laying fibre optic cables that were costly and immobile.

Terrabyte, which uses street-level mmWave radios, enables service providers to install the equipment on existing street furniture like lampposts, saving cost and reducing inconveniences, he said.

“Terragraph will also consume the same amount of electricity as an LED lamp,” Lee added at the launch in the city this morning.

The project is deemed suitable for George Town, a Unesco city with many prewar buildings, which may find that it a challenge building an extensive fibre optics network to provide high speed internet to all households.

Communications and Multimedia Minister Gobind Singh Deo said the Terragraph pilot project was timely, and the government was open to any technology that could solve connectivity problems, such as the lack of high-speed broadband access in urban areas despite the high demand.

Only 18% of the eight million households had access to high speed broadband, he said.

“The main hindrances to fiberisation are the terrain, the high cost of fibre optic cables, and trenching works, as well as time. 

“As Terragraph equips street furniture like lampposts, buildings, signages and traffic lights with antennas, this effectively solves the problems,” he said at the launch.

Gobind said the pilot project would reveal in six months whether the Terragraph proposal and module would work, how much it would cost to implement and what issues and challenges were.

“We want to see how the technology works, how it complements fibre, how we can move things to a quicker phase and level so we can get an infrastructure or system set up as fast as possible.

“We don’t just want internet that is cheap and fast. It has to be a service of a certain standard of quality, which comes first.

“Let us look at something sustainable, something people will look at as an option and say we can now move away from fibre,” he said.

Facebook connectivity ecosystem programmes head Bryan Tan said Terragraph complemented fibre optic broadband, extending fibre-like speeds to places with challenges and limitations to lay fibre optic cables underground.

He said the technology would also create an ecosystem of service providers, equipment manufacturers and silicon vendors, who would together “unlock new ways of connecting people”.

Tan said the experience in George Town could be learned by other cities in the world. – February 18, 2019.