At the recent Budget 2017 speech by the Prime Minister, many incentives were introduced to further propel our nation towards a sustainable and growing economy without omitting key proponents that can contribute for these goals. While there were contentions in some of the offerings, the ICT sector can rejoice on boost given for broadband service in country.

We can take comfort that the government is very conscious of technology and the need to include this aspect in the growing of the economy, ICT has been a mainstay in the Budget for decades. This year the startling announcement by PM Najib, made for fixed broadband will be welcome for many including corporates. Effective January next year, fixed broadband will be doubled up while maintaining the price for the service. This would mean users who have been subscribing for the 30MBps would now get bumped up to 60MBps but pay for 30. In order to get varsities up to competing standards around the region, it is also commendable that public universities will now receive speeds of 1GBps at their campus, this will surely assist students to research rich contents on the internet with ease.

For a nation to grow its digital economy and attract investors into the country, the foundation needs to be laid, and having a strong and stable broadband connection is as vital as having electricity at a factory. neighbouring countries are already offering up to a minimum of 1GBps across their cities and much lower cost, which can boost their economy and leapfrog the society from the rest.

Those on fixed broadband plans from Unifi TM, Maxis Fibre and Celcom could see better days comes January. Its a start towards reaching dream speeds of 1GBps, when we don’t have to get frustrated with lagging downloads and uploads, but for now we will take this.