Malaysia will likely be among the many first in Asia to deploy fifth-generation (5G) network technology with the nationwide rollout of the 5G project demonstration next month.
GSM Association (GSMA) CEO Mats Granryd, nonetheless, said Malaysia should take gradual and cautious steps in 5G rollout to have extra space and time to experiment and learn from countries which are already within the advanced phase of 5G rollout.
“You haven’t got to be the primary (in implementing 5G). Perhaps Malaysia can take second or third place because it gives more room to learn from others’ mistakes.
“But Malaysia should not adopt a wait-and-see approach in its pursuit of 5G even though the technology is not yet widely available as the adoption process could take years,” he told Bernama.
GSMA is the industry organization representing the interests of mobile network operators world wide.
Recently, Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) chairman Al-Ishsal Ishak said that 5G demonstration projects will likely be conducted in 32 5G locations in six states – Kedah, Perak, Penang, Selangor, Terengganu and the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur.
Granryd said 5G technology would supply solid support for every day activities, enable seamless business transactions and be cheaper as maintaining 3G technology over time can be costly as global technology advances rapidly.
Network modernization is mandatory to support the growing variety of devices requiring Internet access, a lot of which require some bandwidth to operate normally, and 4G simply not cuts it, he said.
