In a lengthy release to the media, ex MDEC Chairman Dr Rais Hussin who runs the Emir Research think tank rubbished DNB’s reply to a published article the research firm had submitted to the media.
Dr Rais called the reply semantic acrobatics while twisting, citing out of context, and deliberately misrepresenting EMIR research perspective which is based solely on data, telecom industry specifics, and economics.
DNB had jointly with Plum Consulting published a response on its website “Should M’sia abandon its SWN 5G rollout?” which in the article calls the action detrimental and costly for the government. It had also argued that Emir had not done enough research on the SWN model or the Dual Wholesale Model before publishing the research paper.
EMIR Research vehemently claims to not suggest both options but alternatives as it suggests data, telecom industry specifics and economics support the notion that Single Wholesale Network (SWN) and Dual Wholesale Networks (DWN) alike lead to a highly undesirable monopolistic effect on the telecom industry leading to low competition and, as a result, low innovation and quality of the internet.
Dr Rais also adds that when individual MNOs are not given the freedom to deploy their own active network equipment (and DNB admits “there will be one set of electronics… to carry data between base stations and end-user devices”), we have a big problem—MNOs can no longer compete on the quality of network which is the key differentiating feature and all other features, including differentiation “on retail end” which DNB keeps emphasising are only secondary to and dependent on the network quality.
Citing examples of countries using SWN model and failing, EMIR Research reiterated that they were mediocre, at best, performance in terms of network quality and nationwide penetration by all the countries that adopted SWN-model (government-led or MNO consortium-led alike) for their 4G rollout is glaring in comparison with the nations who did not.
The 4G SWN-adoption cases are failures due to the monopolistic effect and the delinking of network ownership from service delivery! And 5G, due to the specificity of its use cases, especially for enterprise solutions (the most critical segment for Industry 4.0), will require even closer cooperation between network and end-user devices.
As for Brunei 4G SWN experience and Plum’s quoted rural shared networks in some parts of the world are rather interesting and unique case studies he said. Adding that they are unique in that sense that they cannot be considered out of their important context — a small geographic area with a small population size.
Even Russia which has been initially debating over 5G SWN mainly due to its 5G spectrum scarcity finally decided to free up the band to be still able to proceed with the beauty contest. This is because spectrum ownership by MNOs is synonymous with the active network equipment ownership by MNOs, which is tightly linked with competition, innovation and quality!
At the same time, Dr Rais says there is also a massive global trend recently towards sharing the passive network infrastructure elements, which have clearly been put as the way forward to bring 4G and 5G services to our rural areas.
He argues that first, DNB wrongly claim that “Emir Research suggests that there are two approaches to delivering 5G which they term “demand-driven” and “supply-driven””. What EMIR Research consistently emphasised is that precisely what DNB now finally admits itself, with the Plum’s help though,—”all mobile deployment is based on predicted demand”, ok, “an informed variant of being supply-led”, if DNB wants to put it that acrobatically.
At the same time, EMIR Research has never suggested that “5G should be deployed only after the demand for it has emerged”. Instead, EMIR Research has only emphasised that given Malaysia’s level of 5G preparedness, or rather unpreparedness, it makes no sense to rush and push 5G at that grandiose scale as suggested and urged by DNB.
Also, Emir Research has never argued “that there is little point in deploying 5G now in Malaysia because it lacks the digital skills and ecosystem needed to benefit from the advantages that it brings” he said.
With regards to delivery, the EMIR Research CEO said is that adoption of 5G technology is going to be patchy and, at best, enterprise-solution driven, and therefore, DNB’s pitch of delivering 80% 5G coverage by the end-2024 makes no economic sense but sounds like a tremendous waste of resources that are direly needed now to fix our other digital elements.
And it is not that “the EMIR Research’s argument is flawed”, but Plum’s assertion is rather simply naive to think that “all the elements of the ecosystem and digital skills needed” will be delivered and fall in place magically just because we have Malaysia’s Digital Economy Blueprint. Malaysia has never been short of blueprints but extremely poor in implementation, especially of recent. In fact, Malaysia’s Digital Economy Blueprint has been there already for two years. Have we seen any impact on our digital ecosystem for these two years? The data points to the opposite (see “Malaysian 5G Rollout — Exhibit “A” for Misplaced Solution” from February 10, 2022), he concluded.
(the article will be split as a 2 part series, catch second part on Monday)
Dr Rais Hussin is the CEO of EMIR Research, an independent think tank focused on strategic policy recommendations based on rigorous research.
