A culture of infrastructure sharing has existed in Malaysia since the turn of the millennium when the MCMC licensed over a dozen State-backed towercos, one stop agencies to permit and build towers in their respective States. Fast forward to 2014, after the consolidation of Malaysia’s MNOs from five the three, and Malaysia was host to the first carve out within Axiata’s edotco empire. edotco now operates 3,600 of Malaysia’s 22,000 towers, while the State-backed towercos operate a further 3,200. Drawing on insights gleaned from the Malaysia roundtable at the TowerXchange Meetup Asia 2015, let’s take a closer look at the unique structure of Malaysia’s tower and mobile market.
The unique structure of the Malaysian tower market
