JARING

» see jaring.my as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Malaysia's first internet connection was a government research project with an acronym to match. JARING stood for Joint Advanced Research Integrated Networking, it was built by MIMOS under the Sixth Malaysia Plan, and in 1992 it installed a 64 kbps satellite leased circuit from Kuala Lumpur to Stockton, California. That was the entire country's link to everything. By early 1992 it had signed up 27 organizations and around 200 users, and by 1994 it was 254 organizations and nearly 1,700 individual members.

Those numbers are worth sitting with. For two years, the population of Malaysians on the internet would have fit inside a lecture hall, and every one of them was reaching the rest of the world through one satellite hop paid for out of a five-year national development plan.

I have no memory of JARING because I was never in Malaysia, but I recognize the shape of it precisely. Turkey's first connection went up in April 1993 out of a university in Ankara, also on a 64 kbps line to the United States, one year behind Kuala Lumpur. When I got online in 1998 on a 14.4k modem, the national pipe I was dialing into had been built the same way, by the state for researchers and then opened to whoever would pay. Malaysia's version of that story ended in a liquidator's office. Turkey's became TTNet.

~ the dossier ~

~ the state years ~

JARING kept being first at things for a while. In 1997 it became the first ISP in Southeast Asia to install T3 lines at 45 Mbit/s. In 1999 it lit SuperJARING, a 2.5 Gbps backbone running the length of Peninsular Malaysia, which for the era was a serious piece of engineering for a country of 22 million people.

The ownership kept moving underneath it. It was spun off as a separate company under MIMOS Berhad on 1 April 2005, and in December 2006 the Ministry of Finance took direct control. A state-owned pioneer ISP in a market where the incumbent telco was also state-owned and rather better at selling broadband is a difficult position to hold, and JARING held it by being the one the government kept funding. In 2013 the company booked around RM110 million in revenue while losing somewhere between RM6 million and RM10 million a year.

~ the two million ringgit sale ~

On 1 January 2013 Utusan Printcorp Sdn Bhd took 100 percent of JARING from the Ministry of Finance. The price was RM2 million. Puncak Semangat had earlier bid RM40 million for the same company and had not got it, which means the country's first internet provider changed hands for five percent of a live offer, to a printing arm of a newspaper group. Norhisam Mohamed Nor came in as chief executive talking about growth.

~ what was left in the building ~

It took under two years. In November 2014 CIMB Bank and a second creditor filed the liquidation notice, over a debt to CIMB alone of RM10 million. Liquidation followed on 23 April 2015. In May, KPMG's deal advisory arm terminated 97 employees at short notice, and the utility was threatening to cut the power over roughly a million ringgit of unpaid electricity.

jaring.my still resolves. What it returns is an Apache 403, the default one, three lines of HTML telling you that you do not have permission to access this resource. Somebody is paying for the domain and nothing is behind it. The first network in the country is a permissions error.

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