Overseas offers to replicate I-City

I-BERHAD, which is developing the I-City intelligent township that is envisaged to be Selangor's knowledge hub and in the league of the Dubai Internet City in the United Arab Emirates, has received offers from China and Vietnam to replicate the RM2 billion development.

Executive director and chief executive officer Datin Tey Siew Thuan said it has plans to redevelop I-City overseas, and possibly also in Penang, in three years.

"I-City is the concept of the future and the (Chinese and Vietnamese) investors are keen to have a similar model in their environment. We are studying the offers currently," Tey said.

I-City is the first technology-driven commercial development in Malaysia.

In uplifting the development, Tey said that I-Berhad will partner Telekom Malaysia Bhd (TM), Maxis Communications Bhd and Time dotCom Bhd to offer high-speed broadband Internet services with uptime of 99.9 per cent, as per MSC requirement.

"We are tying up with established business partners to promote I-City. TM and Maxis are expected to come in by August and Time by 2009," said Tey.

I-City is offering fibre optics and Cisco network at its development. It has enlisted the expertise of Australian-listed ServCorp Ltd in June 2007 to provide the infrastructure and Internet Protocol or IP-based services.

Kompakar Inc Bhd has been appointed to manage its data centre, which would house the servers.

"I-City's entire area is connected with a giga-speed fibre-optics network that allows for complete connectivity and mobility, resulting in a true plug-and-play environment," said Tey, adding that it is the only commercial property in Malaysia with a last-mile fibre optics to the units network, and with a capacity up to 1Gbps, making it different from other cybercentres here.

The network supports a wide range of IP-based services and applications and has a super-broadband redundancy where a multi-telco environment exists, enabling owners and tenants of I-City to enjoy continuous uninterrupted broadband connections and simplicity of integrated billing system.

In addition, I-City has all the right components for a second-generation Internet development, known as Web 2.0, and redundant power through a second source of power supply from Klang.

By New Straits Times (by Sharen Kaur)