Abolish Astro monopoly satellite TV

Let us hope that Pakatan Rakyat gains Federal power soon and consider removing the monopoly ASTRO (controlled by Ananda Krisnan) has over satellite television. The compelling reason is Malaysians are forced to use a lesser quality satellite TV which goes blank during rain. The email forward I received which I reproduce below will tell you why ASTRO must have their monopoly scrapped:

My friends,

This is an explanation on why our Astro channels go blank during rain, written by an engineer friend.

BH

---

In Malaysia, the Asshole (a.k.a. Astro) arranged for the govt to ban all large satellite discs for public use before the Asshole launch their satellite TV service. All other countries allow large antenna of more than 1.0m that you can receive from any channel in the world. With the small <1.0m antenna that we are allowed to use we can only receive satellite broadcast from the Asshole and pay every month to line some people’s fat pockets.

When we are only allowed to install the miniature antenna we cannot receive other satellite broadcasts other than the Asshole's channels and must use their decoders.

This scheme is deliberate, and when they use such small discs the frequency they use is much higher..

Satellite transmission has many bands ranging from C , X, Ku, K, and Ka bands. And the frequency increases from around 4GHz (uplink higher frequency) and downlink lower frequency, 6GHz, 8Ghz, 14Ghz, 15Ghz and 30Ghz respectively.

The C bands used by most geosynchronous satellites for communication is most resistant to rain attenuation while the higher frequency bands like Ku and above suffer easily 5 times more signal attenuation during rain. You can overcome this by having higher power and gain in the antenna, but the very purpose of Asshole using the miniature antenna (larger antenna are banned and illegal in Malaysia and no other country did this) is to restrict the gain and make sure that everyone can only receive the Asshole's channels and not the other channels that other countries nearby can receive.

So the trade off in Malaysia is we cannot receive satellite TV transmission from other channels other than Asshole's channels (due to small disc with low gain) and suffers greatly when it rains.

It is very profitable for the Asshole as we can only receive Assholes channels (they can have high power transmission from the satellite) since the gain from the disc will not be good enough to pick up signals from other channels other than Asshole's transmission. They encrypted their transmission, if you are not a paying subscriber you cannot receive the transmission. When it rains, the attenuation will cause the screen to go blank due to poor signal strength as the gain of the antenna is too low and you see nothing.

All Malaysians have suffered this loss of access to free satellite TV the day Ananda Krishnan got his licence to start Asshole TV when large TV discs were banned in Malaysia (except for commercial applications).

So my conclusion is Asshole did not choose the wrong satellite band, they choose the band deliberately to make sure that they can get maximum profit and service (or rather poor service) is not part of their equation.