KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 18 — The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) will work closely with telecommunication service providers to ensure good coverage and quality of services throughout the country for the upcoming 15th General Election (GE15).

MCMC chief operating officer Datuk Mohd Ali Hanafiah Mohd Yunus said the commission would be referring to its action plan from the previous state elections in Johor, Melaka and Sarawak in working towards providing good coverage for the GE15.

"Once we have the details from the Election Commission regarding the locations of polling stations and vote counting places, we will do the coverage checking; and if it is weak, we will work with the industry to improve the coverage.

"All our states teams will be working together to check the coverage and that is the first priority in terms of providing adequate and good coverage for the polling and counting stations,” he said during a media briefing today on the National Digital Network Plan (Jendela) Phase 1 performance for the third quarter (Q3) of 2022.

Mohd Ali Hanafiah said that as of September 30, 2022, the mean mobile broadband speed stood at 52.48 Megabits per second (Mbps) while the median was at 30.65 Mbps.

A total of 7.44 million premises had been passed with fibre connectivity against the Phase 1 target of 7.5 million premises, while the total 4G coverage stood at 95.82 per cent as of the second quarter (Q2) of 2022.

"Going into the last quarter and based on the achievements so far, we are confident that we will be able to achieve the targets for Jendela Phase 1 by the end of the year.

"Most of the targets outlined in Phase 1 have already been achieved. Those that are still pending are the construction of 1,661 new sites across Malaysia to extend the mobile 4G coverage in rural and remote areas; and the fiberisation of additional premises, of which about 62,000 premises are left to be completed,” he added.

Meanwhile, on the 5G rollout performance, Mohd Ali Hanafiah noted that the total 5G coverage in populated areas nationwide had reached 33.2 per cent to date against the target of 37.9 per cent by the end of the year.

He added that for Q3 2022, the commission had built 944 new 5G sites, or 73.2 per cent of the targeted 1,290 sites nationwide for the quarter. In total, 1,915 sites out of the 3,518 sites planned for 2022 have been completed.

"The 5G coverage has now been extended to Perlis, Pahang and Kelantan with completion of four sites that have been brought forward from the original plan in 2023 target,” he said.

In the meantime, he said MCMC had received a total of 54,423 network complaints since January 1, 2022, with monthly complaints in 2022 being comparatively lower — by between 24 per cent and 88 per cent — than in the corresponding months of 2021.

"We have been able to address most of the complaints, and the number of network complaints for Q3 2022 has seen a reduction of 68 per cent compared to Q3 2021,” said Mohd Ali Hanafiah. — Bernama