The National Digital Infrastructure Plan (Jendela) will have a budget of around RM21bil and continue some goals set down by its preceding plan, says the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC).
Its chairman Dr Fadhlullah Suhaimi Abdul Malek said Jendela’s budget would be similar to that of the National Fiberisation Connectivity Plan (NFCP), which also aimed to improve digital connectivity and broadband infrastructure throughout the country.
The previous government had allocated RM21.6bil as part of last year’s budget for the five-year plan, which was to be executed in six phases.
“Many of NFCP’s second phase objectives would be subsumed into Jendela. However, a few projects needed to be revisited since public demand has changed a lot in the last two years since NFCP was first introduced,” he said.
He pointed out that the Covid-19 pandemic had changed the public’s lifestyle and Internet utilisation, like how people spend less time in the office and school while using data heavily from home.
He said this meant the technical requirements from NFCP would need to be revisited, and deliverables to be changed.
He added that the cost of technology involved in broadband infrastructure had also dropped over the last two years.
Fadhlullah Suhaimi said a main target of Jendela would be to boost 4G connectivity in the country, ahead of moving towards next-generation 5G networks.
He revealed that Jendela projects had already started to result in slight improvements in 4G connectivity, increasing to 92.05% from 91.8% since it started.
On Aug 29, Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin announced the Jendela programme which aimed to improve mobile broadband network speeds from 25Mbps to 35Mbps, and provide 7.5 million premises with fixed broadband access with gigabit speed.
He also announced that the programme would sunset the 3G network in phases, to clear up spectrum for 4G.
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