3G Video Interconnection for Malaysia

Malaysia’s Celcom and Maxis have launched 3G interconnection, enabling interconnect video telephony. By opening access between the two major 3G networks, the 3G user community in Malaysia immediately increased twofold, allowing Celcom’s and Maxis’ users to make and receive video calls, and send and retrieve video messages among themselves.

Both service providers are confident that interconnection will boost take-up and usage of 3G video telephony and video messaging services, as how interconnection did to SMS and to an extent MMS. After interconnection for SMS was established in 2001, usage of text messages almost doubled from 3.6 billion SMS sent in the following year to 6.2 billion SMS sent in 2003.

The Celcom-Maxis 3G interconnection was launched after a series of performance tests since end of last year in making sure that the service works.

According to The Mobile World figures, Maxis ended last year with just over 7.8 million customers, while Celcom ended with just over 6.8 million customers. Celcom also breakdown their subscriber base, revealing that Celcom ended the year with 52,000 3G customers. [3G!]

Read more: Cellular News