Maxis Upgrades Its Fibre Backbone to 1.2Tbps: Will Your Internet Get Faster?

Maxis has upgraded its nationwide optical transport network using Nokia’s 1830 PSS and PSE-6 optical technology, reaching transmission capacity of up to 1.2Tbps per channel.

While "1.2Tbps" sounds astonishingly fast, it is important to understand what this metric actually represents before expecting an automatic speed boost on your home Wi-Fi.

What Does 1.2Tbps Actually Mean?

1.2Tbps equals 1,200Gbps (or 1,200,000Mbps) of raw network transmission capacity.

However, this is a measure of backbone infrastructure capacity, not consumer subscription speed. Think of internet architecture as a transport system:

1. Optical Backbone (1.2Tbps): A multi-lane interstate highway carrying massive volumes of traffic between cities, data centres, and international gateways.
2. Your Fibre Connection (e.g., 300Mbps): The dedicated connection between your home and the ISP’s access network.

Widen the multi-lane highway, and the network has more capacity to handle traffic—but your subscribed broadband speed remains determined by your plan.

Backbone Capacity vs. Home Broadband Speed

Will Your Maxis Home Fibre Become Faster?

Not automatically. Your download and upload speeds remain governed by the broadband tier you subscribe to.

However, expanding backbone capacity provides important structural benefits:

1. Better Peak-Hour Capacity: More network headroom to handle heavy traffic during high-usage periods.
2. Better Support for Cloud Services: Greater transport capacity for data centre interconnections, enterprise workloads, and cloud-hosted applications.
3. Future-Proofing: More capacity to accommodate continued growth in 5G, streaming, AI, and enterprise data traffic.

Why Is Maxis Upgrading Infrastructure Now?

The growth of artificial intelligence workloads, hyperscale cloud facilities, Data Centre Interconnects (DCI), and overall data traffic requires significantly higher optical transport capacity.

By expanding the usable optical spectrum with C+L band technology, Maxis can increase transmission capacity over its existing fibre infrastructure without necessarily deploying new physical fibre cables.

If Your Internet Is Slow Today

A backbone capacity constraint is rarely the first thing to investigate. Before blaming the ISP network, go through these basic checks:

1. Test via Ethernet: Connect directly to your router via LAN cable to separate Wi-Fi issues from the actual fibre connection.
2. Check Your Wi-Fi Band: 5GHz or 6GHz generally provides better performance than 2.4GHz under suitable conditions.
3. Check Your Router: Older routers may struggle with multiple connected devices and heavy simultaneous traffic.

NetBijak’s Take

Don’t upgrade your home broadband plan or expect a sudden speed jump just because you see “1.2Tbps” in corporate news headlines.

Maxis expanding its backbone capacity gives its network more headroom to handle growing data traffic, peak-hour demand, and enterprise workloads. But for home users, real-world performance is still affected by your subscribed plan, router hardware, and local Wi-Fi environment.

Infrastructure upgrades build a wider highway—your broadband subscription still determines the speed of your car.

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