Jalenas -- Malaysia's very first open-access city network was launched in Kuantan in the state of Pahang on 4th August.

Malaysia's Prime Minister, Dato' Sri Najib Tun Razak cut the ribbon to launch Jalenas and open its Network Operations Centre in Putra Square, in conjunction with the launch of the MSC Malaysia Pahang Initiative that day. Deployment of the outside plant will begin this third quarter.

Multiple service providers, such as Internet service providers (ISPs),  Internet Protocol Television television (IPTV) and video-on-demand broadcasters, videoconferencing, online education, electronic-commerce, telemedicine, multimedia content, software-as-a-service (ie. cloud computing) and other applications and services can be provided by independent third-parties over the Jalenas' all-fibre network. which will enable fair competition and a wide choice of services and service providers for end users.

Unlike existing broadband services where the bandwidth is shared between subscribers in an area, with Jalenas each home or office will have their own direct dedicated fibre connection to the network, hence all that bandwidth to themselves.

At the same time, especially cellular network operators can use Jalenas as an affordable high bandwidth the backhaul link between their base station and the edge of their network core, where they previously used expensive microwave E1 links.

No conflict of interest

The key significance of open access is the absence of conflict of interest between the network owner and operator, and the service providers, since neither the owner nor operator will provide services to compete with the third party providers, unlike what's happened in Malaysia previously and moreover, the large numbers of service providers, said to currently number 69.

Jalenas is owned by High Speed Broadband Technology Sdn Bhd (HSBT), a joint-venture between Pahang Technology Resources Sdn Bhd which is owned by the Pahang state government and Bumiraya Resources Sdn Bhd, a privately funded company.

Ericsson Malaysia will be responsible for the end-to-end design, deployment, management, maintenance and quality-of-service assurance of the network, as well as the customer premises equipment installation teams, either itself or through local sub-contractors.

Fellow Swedish company, PacketFront through its local partner Metroverse Sdn Bhd will provide the DRG 600 Digital  Residential Gateway in the premises, and its BECS control and provisioning system which lets end-users subscribe to or unsubscribe from whatever third-party services and packages they want

This open-access model has been successfully deployed in countries such as Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Canada and the United States, and is currently planned for deployment in Australia and Singapore, as they enable economies of scale and critical mass, hence lower cost which can be passed on to end-users.

It essentially is the high-tech equivalent of a road and highway network with multiple pedicab, taxi, bus and delivery service operators providing services to end-users over it.

“Under the first phase of our network rollout, we aim to provide over 30,000 available connections to homes and offices in Kuantan and to initially provide between 30 and 100Mbps bi-directional bandwidth per subscriber,” HSBT Executive Director, Heikal M. Ali told members of the media. However, he would not disclose how much the company would charge the service providers for use of its network.

Such bi-directional or in technical terms, symmetric bandwidth is essential for a good user experience of interactive, real-time communications such as voice-over-IP and videoconferencing, while at least 30Mbps is required for good high-definition IPTV viewing.

For example, Aastra Telecom Sdn Bhd, the local subsidiary of Canada-based Aastra Technologies Ltd provides the Aastra Virtual Presence (ViPR) range of IP-based, touchscreen videoconferencing terminals which not only display pictures of the local and remote ends but which also allow for video sharing in illustrative, educational, telemedicine and other such applications.

Aastra Technologies had acquired Ericsson's Enterprise Business division in April 2008.
 
Satellite TV operator Astro is also said to have shown interest to deliver its programmes over Jalenas, where until now it beams them via its Measat satellites.

Jalenas is also expected to help increase socio-economic benefits for local businesses and the general population.

Broadband was first launched in Malaysia as an ADSL service in 2001 and still is the dominant for of broadband today and Malaysians often complain bitterly about how slow it is compared to broadband in some neighbouring countries.

A few wireless broadband providers have come on stream since then but still, Malaysia's broadband penetration per household was 22.9% as of the first quarter 2009, according to Malaysia's regulator, the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission, so we are still far short of the government's goal of  50% household broadband penetration by the end of 2010.

This also isn't good, especially for our multimedia content and services industry. For example, at the recent PIKOM Leadership Summit 2009 & PIKOM Software and Services Showcase 2009 on 20 and 21 July, a company which provided videoconferencing systems complained to Comm & Tech Asia over a cigarette that slow broadband uplink speeds of under 384Kbps were insufficient for smooth images.

ADSL, which is the dominant DSL flavour in Malaysia by far, typically has downlink speeds of around 1Mbps, which is enough for a decent streaming video experience but videoconferencing requires that the uplink also be fast enough to adequately accommodated the equally fast video stream in the opposite direction.

At the same time, a top executive with the Multimedia Development Corporation grumbled that while Malaysia has an excellent network of national highways, ports, airports and impressive buildings, the state of our broadband infrastructure is way behind.

Around the year 2000, general practitioners in Malaysia were criticised in a report by a US-based telecommunications industry analyst firm that they did not have well integrated clinical diagonistic systems and when this writer asked the then president of the Malaysian Medical Association for his comments, he pointed out that unlike the big government and private hospitals which could afford expensive high-bandwidth leased line connections for these telemedicine applications, including the electronic transfer of patient records - including bulky Xray and CAT scan images most general practitioners could only afford dialup lines, over which it would take longer to download a patient's medical records that the average time general practitioners spend on each patient, so if they danced to this American analyst firm's tune and adopted telemedicine, they would not be able to treat as many patients in a day as they did back then.

However even today, with Malaysia's barely pass grade of broadband, general practitioners are generally not known to use telemedicine facilities.

So  reliable high-speed broadband is essential to the domestic consumption of the multimedia content and applications by the many developers his agency has nurtured or is nurturing, telemedicine which is one of MSC Malaysia's Flagship Applications, as well as many other applications, so hopefully, Jalenas will help the government to realise its goal on schedule.
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The initial rollout of Jalenas will comprise a metropolitan  area network (MAN) based on Metro-Ethernet technology.

It will be comprised of a pair of fibre rings running past offices and homes in Kuantan. These pairs are needed to maintain communications should one fibre be cut or broken and the topology of fibre networks consists of large or small intersecting ring pairs.

This initial phase is expected to be completed within three years or sooner and to serve 10,000 subscribers.

HSBT next will deploy similar MANs in other towns and cities across Malaysia based on demand by service providers. HSBT is eying Bandar Iskandar in the Iskandar development region in Johor state, and altogether plans to serve 2.5 million urban homes and offices within five years at a total cost of about RM10 billion.    

However, it will initially begin with an RM40 million investment and help fund future projects with earnings from installed projects, augmented by bank loans when needed.

Meanwhile, the Pahang Menteri Besar (Chief Minister), Dato' Sri Adnan Yaacob also announced that the state would provide a plot of land by the coast for companies to build submarine cable landing stations, which will enable larger international Internet bandwidth.

Until now, only the incumbent telecommunications company, Telekom Malaysia operates such landing stations and while Malaysia has no regulatory restrictions preventing the others from having landing stations, their sheer cost has so far ensured that Telekom remains a de-facto, virtual monopoly by default, though it's hoped that with sufficient demand, it will be viable for other operators to have landing stations.