A lot of things are due to politics involves government income.
You forgot what really happen to one of our previous Minister of Communications.
Basically if you did too good of a job, shareholder is not happy. Check out who is TM's majority shareholder.

To me the most effective method is allow multiple last-mile provider. The advertisement and competition will take care of things.

BUT this is also the reason why they do not want multiple telco to build out 5G network. The government want to be in a position to do price-fixing. For U, they quickly announced all fiber will be provided by TM, same goes for DNB.

Same story with submarine cable landing station. You need cable kuat to even build one. Look at who owns all the cable landing station in Malaysia.

Like blacktubi said, this kind of thing is not exclusive to Malaysia.
In China the big 3 state-owned telcos control 95% of the user base. They practice a lot of gatekeeping.
Chaebol controlled telcos in South Korea did the same.
NTT in Japan.
TATA in India.
NBN in Australia.
Sprint, Lumen, ATT in US.

Check out ViewQuest SG. You get 10gbps for that price.

Netlink Trust gives you dark fiber in the last mile.
TM don't do that. NBN don't do that.

NBN is butchered when they changed government and decided multi-technology mix is a great idea.
On top of that, the incumbent scammed the government into buying their expired copper network.
Then for many years retail provider need to pay for absurd CVC charges, which was removed recently but came with a "price hike".

Price hike in quote because... Depending on how you see it.
Other than that, the network is very solid.

On surface yes but then it's not so clear cut.
Eg: DNB is like NBN but then majority shareholder are private telco.
NBN remains neutral, more like Netlink Trust.

For TM, the whole HSBB is funded by taxpayer, exactly like how SingTel built out the fiber infrastructure in Singapore.

But then SingTel transfer all of them to NetLink Trust while TM continue to make money out of everyone.

Then TM majority shareholder is government coffer.

So I don't know how do you want to rank them. You can say DNB is under MoF, but the stakeholders are not. You can say TM is private entity, but the stakeholders are not.

Telstra is the one who scammed NBN into taking over their expired copper network, after Malcolm Turnbull says he can help save money by using multi-technology mix.

It didn't take long to realize not only it didn't work, the maintenance and repair cost to keep the copper is exorbitant.

NBN then went on cost overrun and then finally decided to ditch the copper and lay fiber.

Hardware are Nokia. Staff are NBN own hire. Telstra is officially the scammer. Maybe even Malcolm Turnbull's best mate.

NBN start later than our HSBB, have a lot more land mass to cover, but they already went from GPON to 25G-PON.

TM still want to continue milking everyone with their outdated infrastructure.

LOL. One of the many victim due to Malcolm Turnbull and his mates.
Move house to places with highly ranked school. Sure got FTTP.

From network engineering point of view, it is easy for Malaysia to get high speed like in Singapore.
Basically telco already covered the country with fiber. It is just across the causeway and you have access to rest of the world via all the submarine cables.
TM already has connection to Singapore. In fact a big part of TM traffic is via Singapore.

I feels it comes down to GLC mindset.
They already monopolize the market. Regardless of what services you use, TM take a cut, whether it is dark fiber, wavelength, HSBB, data center, submarine cable, etc. All the mobile telco are backed by TM's fiber. Every government agency is their customer.

Honestly, if you are TM management, you don't have to work and money still come to you. They are flag telco, they already have the brand recognition and everything. With that, they become complacent.

The goal then become: Do nothing. Just maintain the status quo.
Okay, I am not saying TM employee is not working. I am targeting TM management specifically.
Shareholder want it that way too. Why upgrade when you are still making record profit?

This is so ingrained into their culture that HR handbook explicitly spelled it out. Look for the screenshot I posted in Unifi thread.

So the only way to introduce competition is allow anyone to build last-mile network. There's no way the government can ask for the fiber infrastructure back already. Sudah Hak Milik TM. Not Kerajaan anymore.

After that, the new last-mile provider has a problem. We lack carrier hotel. How on earth the last mile provider want to aggregate traffic is a problem down the road. Is telco willing to meet you at the road side like what NBN is doing? If yes then no problem.

Then all the telco here are used to L3 services because TM literally force it on them. Is telco willing to accommodate by doing the extra work?

In NBN case, telco just need to send an XML file and the service will be up. No technician visit is needed. You bring your own router. Many telco has been asking for this but TM refused to do it after so many years. if any last mile provider can offer this, I feel like telco will love em.

NBN and Equinix Fabric are using the same programmability interface of Nokia gear. I know Cisco and Juniper can do this as well.
China hardware... Another question mark.

If it's like NBN or NetLink Trust then they have the say because it's totally separate organization.
DNB however, is different because telco are also shareholders.

Company like Equinix and NBN only buy the best stuff. Here we buy the cheapest stuff.

From engineering perspective having single vendor do have advantage. All the DevOps can use native YANG model. You only need to test it on one OS. Plus you don't need to care if what you want to do is supported by different vendor.

From management perspective, it would be nicer to have 4 vendors wine and dine you instead of just one.

If you look at TM, they continue buying lower and lower tier stuff.
They started buying Huawei, then ZTE, then FiberHome.
I don't know who they will buy from next.

One good thing that come out of this is TM cannot use any proprietary OMCI. So technically you can buy your own PON stick, plug it in, and it's highly likely to work. Not that I recommend this.

Trust me.. Telco grade stuff all NEBS certified. Won't die so easily one.
That KLIA switch 24x7 for 25 years yo.

The difference of China brand and American brand comes down to capabilities.
China gear still lose when it comes to raw power. 4 Tbps per slot is kind of top end for China brand.
But American brand almost everyone has 28.8 Tbps per slot already in the field. Not lab, not trial.

For DWDM, Ciena has 1.2 Tbps per wavelength right now traversing 3000km. If not mistaken TNB Allo just upgraded theirs with the 800Gbps per wavelength model.
TM is still on 400Gbps even for new project, Nokia gear.

ZTE claimed they had a successful field trial of 1.2 Tbps wavelength as well but did not disclose the distance. Nobody beats Ciena when it comes to wavelength. I don't think ZTE has the tech to do it anytime soon.

Then the software. China gear cannot compete la. If you see the feature list they are about the same. Wait till you actually use them.
American gear all support secure boot after Snowden Leak. China gear still don't.

I suspect many are still cautious. A big factor is TM is working very hard to keep people in contract.
When a new last mile player come in, contract user cannot switch.
But if they don't come in, existing user have no reason not to renew contract for better pricing. Because there's no alternative player.

This creates a chicken and egg problem. The only way to solve this is to come out with a regulation to control how telco tie subscriber to contract.

It's an anti-competitive method for existing player to gatekeep new comer.

By not having contract, user are more willing to try new player knowing they can switch again if service is bad.

It also incentives existing player to buck up. Better fix the evening congestion before your user base disappear.