Screenshots

We are still at the cheeky question of who we should send to the outer-space to tweak twig the radio frequencies of the Measat satellites, no matter if he at all comes back home.

Should it be Toh Swee Hoe, MCMC's current janitor for the clearing up of the spectrum mess; or Mohd Aris Bemawi, the current head of Resource Assignment and Management; or Zamani Zakariah, the guy who was earlier leading the MCMC division, during the time when DVD was the Commission chairman, that had assigned service providers the 3.5Ghz spectrum that is now said to be interfering with Measat's downlink frequencies?

Charles F. Moreira (picture above), senior writer for Mobile World and SURF! magazines -- who caught me napping while waiting for the Minister to show up at the iBurst International Forum last week -- wrote me an email to say that he wasn't being cynical when he suggested Dr Lim Keng Yaik send up an astronaut to tweak the Measat frequencies, instead of disrupting the business of the existing 3.5Ghz users who have already rolled out their commercial services.

Read his takes on this, and many more... like the dirty words 'best effort', the 2006 performance of the multimedia industry, and the officials' attempts in pushing the goal-posts in defining the target 75% penetration rate by 2010 under the National Broadband Plan.

'3.5Ghz and 2.5Ghz under review'

P/S: We do not know if the Minister had made up his mind to allow TM and Maxis to use 2.5Ghz to deploy WiMAX services to compete with the four wireless WiMAX operators? Anyway, MAL said in March that Jaring has 2.5Ghz spectrum and his company would also want to deploy WiMAX when kingdom comes.

Incidentally, TM, Maxis and Jaring, which each has the 2.5Ghz spectrum, had also entered the beauty parade to ask for, and failed to obtain, the 2.3Ghz spectrum to run wireless WiMAX.

The minister had said he understood how spectrum hoggers operate overseas, and he would not allow that to happen in Malaysia. Spectrum is scarce commodity and considered national assets.

An MCMC official told delegates to the iBurst Forum that allocated users of 3.5Ghz and 2.5Ghz spectra are currently under review.

Mailbag
from: Charles F. Moreira charles@oneworld.com.my
to: Jeff Ooi
date: Apr 14, 2007 5:47 AM
subject: Re: 3.3% and 75%

Jeff,

I don't like commenting on your blog because even though I'm a registered user, TypeKey has been a pain in the arse and has not allowed me to comment.

Anyway, be careful about this 3.3% and 75% penetration thing.

According to the Keng Yaik's printed speech the National B/B Plan's target is 75% HOUSEHOLD broadband penetration by 2010.

According to this comprehensive MCMC report attached which was posted to its site recently, we curently have 14.4% household broadband penetration as of Q2 2006 and 3.3% penetration by POPULATION.

The significant and more accurate measure of broadband penetration should be by household, since we don't all walk around with Streamx lines tied to us, though penetration by population would be more significant and accurate for mobile phones which are personal.

'Best effort'

On best effort, an engineer with a company providing WiMAX equipment explained the concept of "overbooking" which roughly goes that if you have a 1Gbps pipe serving your area, it's not economical for the service provider
to serve only 1,000 subscribers, each with 1Mbps accounts, since they would not earn enough from subscriptions to justify that, though each subscriber would be very happy with full 1Mbps speed.

So they have to "overbook" by supplying say 10,000 subscribers, each with 1Mbps accounts, totalling 10Gbps from that 1Gbps pipe and hope that they don't all watch YouTube or do a BitTorrent download at the same time.

In short, no ISP providing shared bandwidth service like ADSL anywhere in the world provides guaranteed bandwidth to the mass market.

Some may overbook less and some may overbook more and maybe Streamyx overbooks too much.

If we want guaranteed bandwidth, we have to then get an E1 leased line and pay the astronomical price.

I'm afraid that's something the good doctor fails to understand.

A fine example is toilets. A building office building 1,000 people does not have 1,000 toilets, since toilet usage patterns are random and they provide enough so that office workers can always find an available urinal or toilet.

However if everyone has the runs all at the same time due to eating something bad at an office party the night before then there will be toilet congestion the next day.

Keng Yaik once said his portfolio included pangsai as well. Maybe he would understand that toilet analogy.

'BTW, I wasn't cynical'

BTW. I wasn't being cynical about sending an astronaut into space to tweak or replace the satellite's transponder. Rather I felt it was a better option than inconveniencing many people on the ground by withdrawing the 3.5GHz and
leaving many customers high and dry without connections.

Instead of playing marbles, making teh tarik and spinning tops in space, that would be a more worthwhile endeavour which would show Malaysia really boleh.

I'll miss Kang Yaik after the next general erections (opps -- slipped into Japanese-English)

Cheers

Charles