According to Informa, the HSBB – a 70/30 joint-venture between Telekom Malaysia and the government – had 310,000 subscribers by end-April and had passed over 1.2 million premises in the country – with the network set to be completed both on time and under budget.

The HSBB deployment has gone so well in Malaysia that there is now talk of extending the network beyond its original target of 20 per cent of the total homes in the country and taking it into more areas outside the Klang Valley, with with strong interest from several state governments in having the HSBB extended into their states.

The HSBB’s progress is way in front of Singapore’s Next Generation National Broadband Network (NGNBN) which has only around 130,000 subscribers so far and, although deployed to nearly 90 pe cent of buildings in the city-state, is still not available to the majority of households because of delays in completing the in-building wiring.

Meanwhile, network deployments in the Australian and New Zealand markets lag way behind the two regional front-runners with Australia’s highly controversial A$43bn state-owned National Broadband Network having only around 7,000 subscribers while New Zealand’s Ultra Fast Broadband deployment has only around 500 hundred subs at present.

“There is no doubt that Malaysia’s decision to stick with the incumbent, Telekom Malaysia, in deploying its next-generation broadband networks is definitely bearing fruit at the moment,” says Tony Brown, Senior Analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media.

“The other NBN markets in the region have deployed more complex NBN models with new and independent entities created to build and operate their NBN networks – and that has taken a lot of time and created some significant teething problems, especially in Australia.”

Nonetheless, Brown says that, although keeping Telekom Malaysia as the key component of the HSBB deployment has facilitated a faster NBN rollout, the government’s decision not to create an independent wholesale network access operator, as is being done in Australia, could be a negative in the longer term.

In addition, Brown says that another problem facing the Malaysian NBN market surrounds content, especially the tight exclusive grip that pay-TV giant Astro has on much of the best TV programming.

“With video set to play such a huge role in the broadband market and with so many operators now launching IPTV services – including both Telekom Malaysia and Maxis – content rights are becoming ever more critical,” says Brown.

“As things stand, an operator like Telekom Malaysia is going to find it hard to really break through as an IPTV player unless it either spends a huge amount of money on content or the government steps in – as the Singaporean regulator did a few years ago – and bans exclusive content deals between programmers and pay-TV operators.

Michael Lai, CEO of Packet One Networks

Malaysian broadband provider Packet One Networks (P1) has signed an agreement with Telekom Malaysia whereby the latter will provide P1 with access and transmission services over the country’s fibre-based High Speed Broadband (HSBB) network.

The new agreement means that P1 will be able to offer branded high-speed broadband services to the 1.3 million homes which are to be covered by the HSBB network nationwide by the end of 2012. P1 will also be able to offer IPTV, video-on-demand and other rich multimedia services in the future.

“P1 customers are big consumers of data with an average usage of 12GB per month,” said Michael Lai, CEO of P1. “HSBB perfectly complements the demand for large data consumption at home. We are indeed excited about what this partnership means for our current customers and for future P1 customers who want the best of both worlds – fibre optics at home and 4G broadband on-the-go.”

Telekom Malaysia has so far rolled out the HSBB network to 1.044 million premises in 77 exchange areas, and reports that it is on target to reach 1.3 million Malaysian homes passed by the end of 2012.

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The HSBB project has been established with investments of MYR 11.3bn ($ 3.64bn), of which Telekom Malaysia is providing MYR 8.9bn and the government is contributing MYR 2.4bn on an incurred claims basis, based on the attainment by Telekom Malaysia of project milestones.