Exploring sustainability of the deployment of wireless broadband in Malaysia rural areas: Comprehensive insights

The Malaysian government has outlined the expansion and development of communication infrastructure as one of the twelve National Key Economic Areas of the Economic Transformation Program (ETP). In line with this effort, Wireless Broadband Network (WBN) has been proposed as the enabling technology to provide wireless broadband access to the rural population. This paper considers WBN as a distributed network comprised of wireless hosts that can communicate with each other in the absence of fixed network infrastructure such as a base station. The deployment of WBN in Malaysia rural areas has complex effects across various domains including social, technological, economical, environmental, and political domains. We expect several parties are involved in the deployment of WBN, including the government (or policy makers), rural communities, service providers, as well as standardization. Due to the complexity of the entire deployment process, this paper provides initial investigation, in a holistic manner, through the technology forecasting approach in order to understand the challenges brought about by the future deployment of WBN tailor-made to rural Malaysia. The outcome of this investigation explores new research direction, and this is important for making future investment and strategic decisions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt in the literature to date to perform technology forecasting on wireless broadband access in rural areas in order to achieve sustainable deployment. This paper aims to discover new research directions and areas in order to expedite the ETP program implementation.