Malaysia's mobile broadband market will balloon to RM9 billion by 2015 from RM6 billion last year, says Nitin Bhat, Frost & Sullivan ICT Practice Asia-Pacific partner and senior vice-president.

"Increasing use of smartphones, driven by rapid price decline and application richness, has boosted demand for mobile broadband," he said.

Nitin said Smartphones access to the internet via 3G connection allowed users to be connected on the go without the need for dongles.

As the mobile subscribers market was heading towards saturation, market players were looking at mobile broadband as a growth driver, he said.

Among others, he said, wireless broadband has been fast gaining popularity over fixed broadband with almost two million wireless broadband subscribers compared with 1.65 million fixed broadband subscribers last year.

In 2009, fixed broadband dominated over wireless broadband with 1.4 million subscribers to 0.9 million subscribers, he told a media briefing today.

Nitin said fixed broadband would gain market share this year and next year due to introduction of the high-speed broadband and wholesale deals by Maxis and Celcom.

"Government support for high speed broadband will also help drive the fixed broadband market. The Malaysian fixed broadband market is expected to reach 2.2 million subscribers in 2015," he said.

70% will have personal Internet access by 2015

With the Internet user base to reach 23.25 million by 2015, it is expected that 70 percent of them would have access to personal Internet connection, Nitin said.

The smartphone strategy will be the big bet of all mobile operators going forward especially when almost 13 million broadband users are expected to access the Internet via smartphones by 2015.

As for the enterprise service market, Nitin said its revenue is expected to reach RM5.8 billion in 2015 as compared with RM2.7 billion last year.

"The Malaysian data centre services market is set to grow at 16 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR), with cloud computing to be an important growth driver as Malaysian enterprises demonstrate increasing interest in cloud services," he added.

- Bernama