Yesterday we were alerted to the news that a court order has been issued to put Malaysia’s first Internet Service Provider (ISP), Jaring Communications Sdn Bhd, under the control of a liquidator. The news first broke via a Facebook post by the company’s former CEO, Dr Mohamed Awang Lah.
In his post, Dr Awang Lah said that he was both sad and happy that this episode has come to be. He said that he was sad that the pioneering service that JARING introduced to Malaysia (remember dialing 1511 to access the internet?) has been allowed to come to this state but he’s also happy that a more responsible body has been given the trust to manage JARING for the time being. Dr Awang Lah, who has had no involvement with JARING since his retirement in 2010, hopes that the company will be brought back to its feet soon.
According to the former CEO, JARING first started off as RangKoM in 1986 and he was the person who helped set up and develop its services. JARING (derived from Joint Advanced Research Integrated Networking) was incorporated and launched in 1992 after it had successfully installed its first international satellite leased 64 kbps circuit. It connected Kuala Lumpur to Stockton in the United States and enabled Malaysians to be linked directly to internet as well as to take advantage of the newly rolled-out 45 Mbps (T3) NFSNET backbone in US. 1992 also happens to be the year that the Internet Society (ISOC) was founded, making Malaysia one of the few countries in the world to have access to the internet right after World Wide Web opened to public (in 1991). In 2005, JARING became a subsidiary of MIMOS Berhad and then in 2006, was taken over by Ministry of Finance (MOF).
Dr Awang Lah had added that JARING’s fall from grace started when MOF sold it to a 3rd party that was only interested in the profit that is to be made with a sale; instead of doing what’s best for JARING and in its interest. A quick check on JARING’s own site revealed to us that the 3rd party mentioned was actually Utusan Printcorp Sdn Bhd (UPSB), which completely took over from MOF and turned JARING into a privately held company in January of 2014. UPSB itself is not without its own scandals when it was revealed back in October last year that it had not been paying its own staff. Dr Awang Lah also claimed that JARING was not the only victim and said that he was disappointed that no immediate action was taken to stop the rot, despite certain government agencies being privy to the situation. He also expressed disappointment that MOF was not careful when it picked JARING’s new owner.
We’ll just have to wait and see how JARING comes out from all of this. Hopefully it’ll rise again like the phoenix, a sentiment that perhaps Dr Mohamed Awang Lah also shares.
JARING was no ordinary ISP and under Dr Awang Lah, the company had received several recognitions and had achieved a few firsts back in its glory days. Here are two of which we feel are its greatest:
- In June 1997, the company became the first ISP in South East Asia to install the T3 (45 Mbps) line in Malaysia. This was just 5 years after the US got theirs.
- In 1999, JARING achieved a world’s first when it introduced the SuperJARING internet backbone infrastructure in Malaysia that stretched from the north to the south, for a total of 841 km. The IP-over-fibre backbone service with its 2.5 Gigabits per second transmission speed made it the fastest and longest of its kind in the world at that time.
The post JARING has been placed under a liquidator – bringing Malaysia’s first ISP to its end appeared first on TechAttack.my.