TM to speed up land lines with fibre-optic cables

0

MIRI: Telekom Malaysia Berhad (TM) is committed to maintain and upgrade fixed land lines to fibre-optics for data communications as physical links still provide the fastest way to move information.

Wireless communications in the form of Wifi connections has taken off in a big way around the world due to operational convenience, without the constraints of laying out messy physical cables.

“Fixed line is still the best and most reliable way to move data, so we (TM) will continue to maintain and upgrade physical lines from time to time,” said TM Sarawak general manager Abdul Rahim Mohd Ali at a high speed Internet access service agreement signing ceremony in Grand Palace Hotel recently (May 15).

Rahim pointed out the weakness of Wifi which tends to reach saturation point quickly due to popularity and congestion, and its performance suffers leading to complaints of the dreaded slowdown.

“Land lines still have the edge when it comes to delivering fast and reliable performance in data communications,” said Rahim, who noted that the common copper cables used in fixed lines has its disadvantages of limited lifespan and increasing resistance with distances, as well as the big headache of being stolen by scrap metal thieves attracted to copper’s high prices.

Hence he explained the need to upgrade the cables from time to time, and copper-based cables will be phased out by the cheaper silicon-based fibre optic cables which are thinner than the human hair.

Fibre-optic cables use transmission of light reflected within to convey data at lightspeed that is very efficient.

“Fibre optic cables are getting cheaper, and will eventually replace copper in stages on demand over about a 10-year period, though it also has a limited lifespan of 20 to 50 years,” he said.

However, there will still be high initial costs of using new equipment for the transmission and reception of data through fibre optic cables which are being laid in urban centres of Kuching, Miri, Sibu, and Bintulu in Sarawak, as offered by TM’s Unifi packages.

As the main supplier of land line communications, Rahim was confident of TM Sarawak delivering quality services to customers in the state, with a sufficiently large workforce of about 150 staffs.

Meanwhile, as a customer of TM, Grand Palace Hotel front office manager Solomon Maran is looking forward to new service offerings like IPTV to deliver TV and movie programming over high speed Internet lines to guests, as a much more economical replacement for expensive satellite programming.