Maxis sends employees out to test its new network

As part of its ongoing network upgrade, Maxis Bhd recently sent out over 1,000 of its employees to test the company’s new network on the ground in an event the company dubbed the “New Network Test Drive.”

The event had some 800 employees in Klang Valley and 200 employees in the other states going out on the streets and testing the company’s new network based on a number of criteria, namely download speeds, loading time of popular websites and YouTube streaming.

Using those test criteria, the company is hoping to optimise its network so that customers will get at least 1Mbps (megabits per second) download speeds 80% of time, with webpages loading in less than 8 seconds and YouTube being able to stream without buffering 96% of the time.

“The test results are critical in serving as an important benchmark for ourselves,” said Morten Lundal, chief executive officer of Maxis Bhd.

Maxis is currently spending some RM1bil this year to upgrade the hardware at its cell towers and in the back-end all over the country to meet the demands of Malaysian customers who are now using more data than ever as smartphone adoption increases.

In fact, Lundal expects network traffic on the company’s network to increase five-fold in the next three years.

Maxis’ network upgrade is expected to reach more than 75% of the population by the end of 2014 and is expected to be completed by the end of 2015 or early 2016.