Celcom expects its 4G network coverage to reach 97-98% by 2022

KUALA LUMPUR: Celcom Axiata Bhd is expecting its fourth generation broadband cellular network technology (4G) network coverage to reach about 97 per cent nationwide upon shu ing down its 3G network by year-end.

Chief executive officer Mohamad Idham Nawawi said by the end of 2022, Celcom is hopeful to get closer to 97-98 per cent network coverage from the 93-94 per cent coverage currently, as the timing to the last 1.0 per cent network coverage is longer than the first 50 per cent.

“Expediting or accelerating on this investment is bringing us a lot closer (to meeting the growing demand).

“It's be er for us to bring the benefit, deployed earlier, so people benefit earlier rather than later,” he said on Bernama TV’s Jendela programme entitled ‘Celcom’s Accelerated Network Investment’ on Thursday.

Mohamad Idham said with the support from the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission, the telco is also expecting to expand its network coverage in some remote areas to about 96 to 97 per cent by year-end. Mohamad Idham said as everything has been accelerated by the pandemic, sunse ing the 3G network, which has been around since 2013, had also been accelerated towards the end of this year.

As a country, he noted that there had been no shut down of a real network except for the first-generation network which was from analog to digital.

“We still have a lot of users using 3G devices. Taking the network down takes a lot of planning as it has implications, but we have started the migration about two years ago.

“We used to have 2.7 million 3G devices in the Celcom network at the end of 2018, and we have been slowly taking it down at the end of 2019 to about 1.7 million.

“We have about 800,000 users at the end of 2020,” he said, adding that the balance 800,000 users are not purely individuals.

“They are also machine to machine industries that are using the network for meter reading, such as power meters and water meters, to transmit data using 3G devices.

“This is a challenge we need to work on and it is everywhere in the country,” he said.

On the country’s National Digital Infrastructure Plan (JENDELA), which is aimed to ensure every Malaysian has quality internet connectivity, he commented that it would be a challenging task but not something that industry players could not overcome.

“The challenge now is that we are reaching out to the population who are further out. As we go further, the population is a bit more disperse and a bit more challenging than the city folk.