Lower costs for Malaysian ISPs, perhaps not for users though
By Goh Thean Eu February 3, 2016
- Arrival of APG and AAE1 to drive down capacity cost
- MyIX in talks with OTT players like iflix and Netflix
WITH two new submarine cable systems connecting to Malaysia this year, the cost to deliver broadband connectivity will be lower over the near-to-medium-term, said Malaysia Internet Exchange (MyIX) chairman Chiew Kok Hin.
But whether this translates to lower broadband prices for consumers remains to be seen, he cautioned.
“This year, the Asia Pacific Gateway (APG) and the Asia-Africa Europe 1 (AAE1) systems are going to be here, so a lot of added capacity will come in.
“When you have a lot more supply than demand, then your economies of scale will allow the cost per megabit to drop
“Whether or not Internet service providers (ISPs) pass on the savings to consumers is their decision,” he said after the official launch of MyIX’s new office in Kuala Lumpur on Jan 29.
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APG is a 10,400km submarine communications cable system that connects China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam and Singapore; while AAE1 is a 25,000km submarine cable system that connects South-East Asia to Europe across Egypt.
Chiew said that besides this new capacity coming onstream, MyIX will also be looking at other ways to help service providers to save costs.
“We also plan to further decrease our port pricing by 11% to 35%, and hopefully the savings achieved by individual companies can be passed on to consumers,” he said.
MyIX, an initiative under the Malaysian Communication and Multimedia Commission (MCMC), is a non-profit and neutral Internet exchange where local ISPs and content providers connect to exchange Internet traffic.
By peering with MyIX, local traffic is kept domestically, therefore keeping boomerang traffic at a minimum. With substantial local traffic being routed via MyIX from international bandwidth links, it allows ISPs to enjoy cost savings via domestic peering.
In talks with content players
MyIX is also in talks with local and international content players to try and convince them to put their content on the MyIX platform so that Malaysians can have a better experience when accessing such content, according to Chiew (pic above).
“We are in talks with over-the-top (OTT) players like iflix and Netflix,” he said, adding that the talks have been proceeding well but declining to elaborate.
Chiew was confident that Malaysia’s very strict censorship regulations would not be a turn-off to such content players.
“Let’s not forget, these OTT players have a presence in many countries, and these countries have different laws with regards to content and filtering.
“So they are pretty much seasoned to that, and as long as they understand the nature of certain laws, it won’t be an issue,” he declared.
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