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GEORGE TOWN: The Penang government today made it mandatory for all future developments in the state to be ready for high-speed internet over fiber optic cables.
The order, which takes effect immediately, comes after the state ranked Internet services on par with other public services, such as water and electricity supplies.
The Chairman of the State Infrastructure Committee, Zairil Khir Johari, said that the statutes of the city council have been modified to consider the Internet as a utility. Penang is believed to be the first state in the country to do so.
“The decision made by the state on December 17 is to support the use of high-speed broadband over fiber optic cables, since the use of copper cables for internet connections is no longer relevant.
“Ensuring that all new development projects are equipped with fiber optic cables will allow us to move to the next step, which is to provide gigabit Internet and accelerate the process towards the faster 5G platform,” he said in a statement.
Copper lines, while they could offer Internet speeds of up to 300 megabits per second (Mbps), were actually only reaching 30 Mbps, previous reports had indicated.
Nearly a million buildings in Malaysia are powered by copper wire-based internet service, telecoms provider YTL reported last year. The World Bank had said that while mobile internet use in Malaysia has increased, adoption of fixed line broadband was too low.
According to a 2018 World Bank study, Telekom Malaysia has more than 830,000 km of fiber optic cables and 92% of the fixed broadband market.
