A State Steps In Where a Federal Rule Left a Gap
Sarawak's internet coverage climbed from 54.3% in 2022 to 94.5% as of June 2026, according to Utility and Telecommunication Minister Datuk Seri Julaihi Narawi, who announced the figure on June 12 at a Sacofa client event in Kuala Lumpur (Malay Mail). The gain came from a RM2.3 billion state programme called Saluran (Sarawak Linking Urban, Rural and Nation), which funded 618 new telecommunications towers — including 17 relay towers — under the Sarawak Multimedia Authority Rural Transformation (SMART) project (DayakDaily).
The headline number understates what changed on the ground. The Sarawak Rural Broadband Network (MySRBN) now provides fixed wireless or fibre service to nearly 50,000 households that had none, and an interim programme called WiFi Saluran has deployed satellite-backed WiFi at roughly 250 remote sites while permanent towers are built out — a stopgap for communities that would otherwise still be waiting (MySRBN). For a state that is more than twice the size of Peninsular Malaysia's landmass with a fraction of its population density, this is a meaningful state-directed correction to a national policy that had been leaving Sarawak behind for years.
This Was a Market Failure, Not Censorship
It's worth being precise about what kind of "internet shutdown" this actually is, because it isn't the kind normally associated with the term. Sarawak's rural blackout spots were never the product of a government order pulling the plug — they were the product of a licensing rule. Malaysia's spectrum obligations require mobile operators to cover 95% of the population, not 95% of the geography. Because Sarawak's rural interior holds only a small share of the state's people, operators could hit their national coverage targets while leaving vast, sparsely populated tracts of longhouses and river settlements permanently unconnected — a gap documented in a 2020 study finding that 67.1% of East Malaysian respondents were dissatisfied with connectivity and that rural 4G speeds ran at less than half the urban rate (Wiki Impact).
That distinction matters for how this story should be read. Genuine internet shutdowns — the kind imposed in India's Manipur or Myanmar — are acts of state power used against speech and information access. What Sarawak fixed was the opposite failure mode: a coverage obligation written in a way that let the market rationally under-serve people the rules were supposed to protect. Conflating the two would flatter neither problem. The remedy here wasn't a mandate to speak or not speak; it was capital — towers, fibre, satellite links — aimed at a population-density loophole that a purely population-weighted licensing formula never should have allowed in the first place.
The Steelman for Direct State Investment
There's a reasonable case that a state government building its own telecom infrastructure, rather than leaving it to federal policy and private carriers, risks crowding out commercial investment or creating an unaccountable state telecom monopoly. Sacofa Sdn Bhd, the Sarawak state-linked infrastructure company managing 1,680 towers statewide and central to Saluran's build-out, is precisely the kind of entity that critics of state industrial policy would flag for scrutiny — a single quasi-public firm holding outsized control over a state's communications backbone deserves real oversight, competitive tendering, and sunset provisions rather than open-ended budget lines.
But the counter-argument here is unusually strong: this is a case where the market, operating under the rules it was given, simply would not have closed this gap on commercial logic alone. Sacofa itself has cited the absence of roads, water, and power in target areas as the reason deployment stayed commercially unattractive even where geographically necessary (Wiki Impact). When a coverage obligation is defined by population share, an operator hits 100% of its legal target while leaving 5% of the population — scattered over the hardest, most expensive terrain — with nothing. That isn't a case for heavier speech-adjacent regulation; it's a case for fixing the metric and, in the interim, for direct public capital to do what a flawed incentive structure wouldn't.
The National Comparison Still Cuts Against Sarawak
Context matters here too. Nationally, Malaysia's broadband coverage in populated areas reached 99.71% by the end of 2025, and the Communications Ministry is targeting 100% by 2027 under the federal JENDELA programme's second phase, which is separately allocating roughly a third of its next 1,000 new sites to Sarawak and a similar share to Sabah (Malay Mail; JENDELA). Even after Saluran's gains, Sarawak sits roughly five points below the national figure — a reminder that the state programme is filling a gap federal policy created and is still closing, not one it has fully closed on its own.
What to Watch
The honest caveat is that 250 satellite WiFi sites are explicitly interim, and interim public infrastructure has a way of becoming permanent when the harder, more expensive tower-and-fibre build-out lags. Saluran's remaining test is whether Sarawak converts those stopgap sites into full connectivity on the same timeline it used for the 618 towers already built — and whether JENDELA Phase 2, beginning as early as Q4 2026, actually delivers the federal share of the remaining gap rather than leaving the state government to fund the rest alone.