{"id":2713,"date":"2013-05-04T00:43:05","date_gmt":"2013-05-04T05:43:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/?p=2713"},"modified":"2013-05-04T12:39:21","modified_gmt":"2013-05-04T17:39:21","slug":"najib-government1malaysia-tech-report-card","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/archives\/2013\/05\/04\/najib-government1malaysia-tech-report-card","title":{"rendered":"Najib government\/1Malaysia tech report card"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Malaysian<\/a>As Malaysia goes to the polls tomorrow, I thought I’d go back and look at what tech goodness has been achieved by the Najib government after the 12th general elections.<\/p>\n

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  1. 1Malaysia Email project (myemail<\/a>) awarded to Tricubes (delisted<\/a> from stock exchange) to provide email to every Malaysian. I wrote<\/a>about<\/a> it and was relatively bullish. Failure<\/strong>.\u00a0<\/li>\n
  2. 1Malaysia laptops at RM990 (link<\/a>). More than 800,000 disbursed<\/a>. Never sold to end users by the looks of it. Using the Intel Atom processor, the netbook market is mostly dead now. Mixed<\/strong>\u00a0(though I haven’t found a student talk about their happiness with this).<\/li>\n
  3. 1Malaysia Pad<\/a> for RM999 (when similar tablets cost around RM300). Awarded to MalTechPro (website seems to have disappeared – maltechpro.com). Failure<\/strong>.<\/li>\n
  4. 1Malaysia Messenger (1MM) via MalTechPro. To compete with BlackBerry Messenger\/Whatsapp. Failure.<\/strong><\/li>\n
  5. Tried to pass<\/a> a Computing Professional Bill 2011 and elect a Board of Computing Professionals. Didn’t succeed (good), on the backburner now (not so good). Semi-failure<\/strong>.\u00a0<\/li>\n
  6. Deep packet inspection leading to Internet filtering<\/a> and the spread<\/a> of a document that contains FinSpy (which is still under investigation as to whom benefits). Failure<\/strong>.<\/li>\n
  7. World class broadband infrastructure – we did see the arrival of fibre, so Unifi, Maxis, etc. can provide faster broadband. Success<\/strong>.<\/li>\n
  8. LTE is kind of here. Surprisingly Puncak Semangat has received spectrum. Company linked to\u00a0Syed Mokhtar al-Bukhary (business kingpin). Reminds me a lot of the 3G spectrum debacle, where DiGi didn’t get any so offered EDGE for a very long time; they however did enrich<\/a> TDC to get the spectrum. Failure<\/strong>.<\/li>\n
  9. Prepaid phones don’t have any GST like postpaid phones<\/a>. This is due to demographic reasons. There is nothing 1Malaysia about it here. Failure<\/strong>.<\/li>\n
  10. RM200 smartphone rebates<\/a>. If my speculation is that it’s for spectrum recycling, it’s not entirely a failure, but getting a RM200 rebate on a phone that costs more than a basic 3G phone (i.e. no more than RM500) is absurd. Failure<\/strong>.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Did I miss anything?<\/p>\n

    If the elections are won by BN, it looks like there are promises<\/a> of laptops for everyone. These seem to be<\/a> Chromebooks, via 1BestariNet<\/a>\u00a0(interesting article to read). So there’s some tech to look forward to post-GE13 if Najib forms government.<\/p>\n

    Update (Sun \u00a05 May 2013 01:39:07 MYT):<\/strong>\u00a0Tekong<\/a> informs that the poor<\/a> in rural\/urban areas will soon enjoy half an hour of Internet usage for free, via all telcos and ISPs because a study conducted shows people only use 15-30 minutes of access per day. This can be good to bridge the digital divide, though it looks like its something that only comes post-GE13. Too early to rate yet.<\/p>\n

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