IT Geography
Information Technology Geographics
High technology concentrated areas
Presently the majority of high technology is located on the Malay peninsula in areas where the GoM provided incentives to attract foreign investors and large skilled labor pools, good infrastructure and broad industrial policies were also in place. These "free trade zones" with a minimum customs formalities and control in terms of raw material and machinery importation were established in several states beginning with Penang and Malacca. Wafer fabrication plants, hard drive makers, modem and peripheral makers are all located in and around these free trade zone areas and are operated by such large companies as Intel, Motorola, NEC, Phillips, Hewlett-Packard and Texas Instruments. With the new GoM Vision 2020 plan the majority of IT business will be encouraged to locate in the MSC arena
Special IT and R&D business parks
Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) is a bold plan that calls for an area that covers a 40 km by 15 km area stretching from Kuala Lumpur City Center (KLCC) to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) in Sepang. The MSC will be equipped with state-of-the art telecommunications and network infrastructure capable of supporting interactive applications. The MSC infrastructure will be serviced by highspeed connections to Japan, the United States, Europe and the ASEAN region through 155-megabit per second (Mbps) international links. As its main trunk, the MSC site will have an asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) based fiberoptic backbone supporting a speed of 2.5 gigabits per second, with the possibility of an upgrade 10Gbps.
Telekom Malaysia has been appointed sole provider of the backbone infrastructure for the MSC. Telekom has its own fiber-optic network which runs over 13,000 km across the country. The infrastructure to be set up at the MSC is to be linked to Telekom's existing network for connections within the country and abroad.
Telekom will invest US$2 billion over eight to ten years to set up the telecommunication backbone infrastructure for the MSC. Telekom will introduce the Corporate Information Superhighway (COINS) which it has developed. COINS is an open multimedia network with extremely high speed and capacity. Telekom will employ an open multimedia network (OMN) design for the project, utilizing the international transmission control protocol/internet protocol (TCP/IP) as its main protocol. With the full fiber network, domestic access speeds can reach up to 155 Mbps. In addition, the area will also be equipped with public switched telephone network (PSTN) and integrated services digital network (ISDN) facilities. Telekom is also considering using asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) technology over copper cables to connect to homes and offices. ADSL is a new technology that allows existing copper telephone lines to perform at super-high data transmission rates.13
