WiMax spectrum in Malaysia

Someone was asking me about the WiMax service provisioning in peninsular Malaysia. Will the 3 companies who have been awarded WiMax licence to operate in Peninsular to operate at the same place?

Well first, we look at the spectrum assignment (http://www.mcmc.gov.my/Admin/WhatIsNew/20374698WiMax%20Press%20release_160307_final_v2.pdf) :
In peninsular Malaysia, Bizsurf was awarded the 2330 to 2360 bandwidth, MIB 2360 to 2390 MHz, and Asiaspace 2300 to 2330 MHz. Meanwhile in East Malaysia, Redtone-CNX was awarded the 2375 to 2400 MHz bandwidth.

Judging from the overlapping of frequency band and near adjacent system frequency, the 3 service providers in peninsular Malaysia will have to coordinate in order to avoid excessive interference among the different networks. In addition, the subscriber market may be too small for the 3 service providers to install their own set of equipment. As discussed earlier, sharing of network equipment among the operators and let the radio network be planned by a company may be a way to achieve optimum network performance. Anyway, the actual deployment may subject to many commercial and political influences.

Wimax: sharing of infrastruture by service providers

Malaysia's four Wimax licence holders (Asiaspace Dotcom Sdn Bhd, Redtone-CNX Broadband Sdn Bhd, Bizsurf (M) Sdn Bhd (a unit of YTL Corp) and Packet One Networks Sdn Bhd (formerly known as MIB Comm)) have set up a consortium to build a common infrastructure for their wireless broadband service.

As the Wimax ISP are providing service in different location, it is not possible for them to share the transmit towers or base station locations. However, they can share the usage of high speed backbone network. This make economic sense from trunking point of view as the backbone connection may not be fully utilised by any operator at any moment.