Deputy Communications and Multimedia Minister, Datuk Zahidi Zainul Abidin yesterday revealed in Parliament that two compounds have been issued to mobile service providers in Malaysia for not meeting the standard set by his ministry. As reported by national news agency Bernama, the two compounds include one amounting to RM60000 and the other compound amounting to RM20000 that is currently beng processed.

Zahidi further revealed that the two service providers compounded were Celcom, which failed to meet the standard in Sabah and the other one is Unifi Mobile, which failed to meet the standard in Melaka and Pahang. The Deputy Minister also confirmed that the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) has opened 20 investigation papers on mobile service providers in our country. 

As many of you should know by now, our local telcos are shutting down 3G networks across the nation. This is in line with the National Digital Network (JENDELA) program that was launched by the Malaysian government in August last year.

By now, some of you have heard the news of 3G services shutting down. Maxis has already begun the process and soon it will be Digi's turn. According to the schedule, it will begin from December 2021 onwards in different states with a different timeslot.

Last month, Maxis announced that it's helping Malaysia Airports Holdings Bhd (MAHB) implement a 5G network in KLIA. Local telco companies are working hard on developing 5G in Malaysia, which means that 4G coverage and speed has to keep up to be a reliable backup. It also means that they're starting to consider shutting down older networks.

If you recall, our Prime Minister Muhyiddin announced that 5G connectivity will be ready by the end of 2021. While the tech community are taking it with a dose of salt, it is quite evident that 3G is phasing out as both Celcom and unifi will shut it down gradually. That said, there are still plenty of 3G-only users especially in the rural areas of Malaysia.

Today, Celcom released their latest Q4 2020 Business Performance report. Finance reports are generally not very exciting to read here but we noticed that there's some interesting information. From the title suggest, the blue telco will indeed shut down the 3G network at the end of 2021.

Recently at the government's meeting in the Malaysia Houses of Parliament, Minister of Communications and Multimedia, Datuk Saifuddin Abdullah said that they will be ready to launch 5G connectivity by the end of 2022 or early 2023. He stated that there would be no plans to launch until they have a clear and detailed plan for the objective.

Back in early November 2019, we wrote news about the 4G connectivity gap between the urban and rural areas in Malaysia and gained some interesting insights about it. This time around, Opensignal went deeper with their research on the performance of our local telco's mobile signal strength in both urban and rural areas.