Broadband providers in competition... is it?

Recently, news have been sprung out that, in the near future, Malaysia will have more providers playing an active part in trying to boost the broadband usage in Malaysia.

Jaring, the second largest Internet Service Provider (ISP) in Malaysia, announced that it will launch its wireless broadband service in the next three months, while Airzed Networks is planning to venture into wireless broadband service for residential customers.

To date, Jaring has captured an amount of 800,000 Internet access subscribers, while its main rival, TM Net, has an amount of just under 1.8 million subscribers. Malaysia has a population of about 23 million and the amount of Internet access subsribers only amounted to 2.6 million. This number does not indicate the amount of broadband users but dial-up and broadband subscribers.

While the increased of broadband and wireless providers might help to boost the number of broadband users, however I feel that there might be other reasons for a user to choose the broadband to the dial-ups.

I put into consideration of the need for the current Internet users in Malaysia. That is, what they usually do when they go online and the content that they will surf for?

The first would be that most of the users connect to the Internet to check for mails, chatting and some light surfing like news reading from a certain websites. These users are categorized as "light users". The point is that it simply means that they do not actually need the broadband-like connection speed to perform these tasks. Furthermore, I would believe that most of the Internet subscribers are working adults and not children. If that is the case, Internet gaming, like networking games, and heavy downloading are seldom the case for these people, or subscribers.

The second that I would consider is the children needs and parents controls. No doubt most of the parents would wish to provide their family with a fast Internet connection so that their children could make good use of it to acquire knowledge from the Internet. In this case, try to imagine that their children uses it to play Internet games. How would the parent react to this? Will the parents down-grade it from broadband access to dial-up access?

While I am not trying to ignore the fact that there are children who actually benefited from the Internet, gaining more knowledge than they could acquire without the Internet, but at the same time, I would not agree that children does not misuse the Internet.

The reason can simply be seen with the misuse of the cybercafe. Cybercafe is supposed to be a facility for users to surf the net and gain benefit from it. However, the motive for these youngsters going to cybercafe is clearly not doing what has been expected. They go to the place merely for networking games.

The birth of the "Ragnarok" server for computer gaming has proof to us that most of the parents aren't happy with that.

The third would be the amount of people that owns at least a computer, and knows what to do with it. Despite the government efforts to promote Malaysian to own at least a computer for each family, but how many of the Malaysians who will or had actually do so, is yet another point that I will consider. Although I do not have data for the actual amount of Malaysian that owns at least a computer, but I do feel that the amount is not satisfying at the moment. Yes, I would agree that I could be considered as trying to speculate on this.

However, consider if the amount of computer owners are not at a convincing level. This would mean that the boost in broadband providers would not make much different since it would not help in increasing the amount of broadband subscribers. Therefore, in order to know if the increase in the quantity of providers will help in boosting the usage of broadband would require us to know if the amount of computer owners is high enough, that is to say, does Malaysia now have a strong market for these broadband technology?

If the government proposed to increase the broadband providers just in the hope to convert the current Internet subscribers, that is around 2.6 million users, to subscribe to broadband, then we should actually reconsider the logic of it carefully.

While I would greatly hope that with the current proposed plan by the government will actually help to increase the broadband usage, however, the doubts that I have in my mind just couldn't make me agree with the government effort without questioning its practicality.

I hope that I have over-worried myself about this... Maybe the deployment of wireless broadband might help to increase the usage of Internet and these services will be able to spread out to cover remote areas too. Let's just wait and see what will happen in the future.