Malaysia’s almost unique experiment in 5G infrastructure deployment based on a single wholesale network shared by all operators is in danger of collapse after the country’s MNOs refuse to accept price terms offered by the government. Admittedly, the country’s public Digital Nasional Berhad (DNB) set up to manage the mobile project has not yet set prices formally and operators may just be playing hardball in the hope they can enforce cost reductions. But after extensive negotiations that have already taken place, there is clearly still some distance between them. More fundamentally, MNOs such as Maxis, Digi and Celcom are opposed to the wholesale business model, which is alien to their instincts for competing over performance and quality of service. The idea…