Pejuang Opposition To Dnb For Mahathir S Self Serving Interest

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Of all the issues beseiging the country, it is certainly interesting to hear the youth wing of Tun Dr Mahathir's smaller start-up party, Pejuang to take up the issue of Digital Nasional Berhad (DNB). 
In a Malay Mail Online report dated Oct 12, Pejuang Youth’s Abu Hafiz Salleh Hudin and the party’s Treasury and Communications Bureau urged the government to call-off the DNB plan. 
DNB is a company incorporated under the Ministry of Finance and not under the auspices of more regulatory Ministry of Multimedia and Communication, in which MCMC is under. 
Since DNB made known the plan to undertake a Single Whole Network (SWN) approach, telcos have been sulking over it. 
Through Groupe Speciale Mobile Association (GSMA), the voices of telco have become louder and more aggressive in applying pressure and lobbying against DNB rolling out of SWN. 

The arguments brought forward by Pejuang Youth is the same argument in the paper prepared by the global cartel and lobby group for mobile operators. (Read Soyacincau.com here)    
It was reported recently that there have been talk of a pushback from the telcos and possibly ganging up against signing up with DNB which would delay the rollout. 

Telcos prefer DNB to merely sell the bandwidth, pocket the money, and sit quietly by the side for the telcos to make billions from the 5G. Telekom Malaysia recently gloated over achieving RM8.38 billion revenue over 9 months for 2021 with growth of 7%.   

The approach of giving away spectrum cheaply has not achieved the desired connectivity and technology upgrade for Malaysia. 
As at September 2020, Tutela report ranks Malaysia at 81 in mobile experience in terms of connection good for most demanding apps. 
in the region, Malaysia is behind Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and even Laos.
Only Digi offers download speed comparable to Thailand. Other service providers such as Maxis, U Mobile, Unifi and Celcom ranks at or lower than Indonesia.  Lets not even compare to Singapore. 
Even that, the quality have been on the decline over the years.  
The spectrum selling approach has resulted in a massive digital divide with the rural area severely under served by 4G.  
The industry spent RM26 billion for 4G over 8 years, but quality and coverage is still far from optimal. The MRSM student in Pitas Sabah had to climb up a tree to get coverage. Slow Internet access is a common frustration. 
Telco have been slackening and its making Malaysia lag in terms of connectivity. 
The situation calls for government to plow in RM28 billion under the JENDELA program to fix the shortcoming of the existing 4G infrastructure. 
Data consumption continues to rise but telcos have not been upgrading their infrastructure to maintain the quality of service. 
Download speed by major telcos have been on a decline by 40% to 50% over the last four years. 
This is despite the lucrative return for the oligopolist telcos. Since its launch in 2013 till 2020, Maxis and Celcom have been generating revenue of RM72 and 56 billion, respectively. 
Despite the lack of quality, their profitability is at an average EBIT of 29% and 13% margin over industry average!
This is the legacy of Pejuang's Chairman. He is customarily allergic to any idea beneficial to the rakyat. 
DNB aspires to offer less than 20 sen for every gigabite for telcos. Charges for leasing 5G will be 50% lower than capital spent for 4G network. At the initial stage, DNB's 5G operation will have its own challenges and need finetuning.  
It is obvious that the Pejuang Youth is being made used off as a political platform to champion Mahathir and his corporate cronies' self serving business interest in Maxis, YTL, U-Mobile, and Altel.  
All the complains and concerns is as Karamjit Singh described as "Much ado over Malaysia's against the grain approach". 
So few countries failed temporarily in their SWN, it is not that Malaysia has not gone through that same path to succeed. 
The social and economic benefit for the country far outweigh any possible short-term setback in profitability. Malaysia need a game changer to take it out of the post-Mahathir economic rut from his constant self serving interference.    
And, it need to keep up with the rest of the world. The rural area must not be denied connectivity and quality of service.          

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