Malaysia Equity Investment Research has maintained a 'neutral' call on the telecommunications sector, as well as Telekom Malaysia Bhd (TM) and Maxis Bhd, with a future value of RM3.50 and RM5.20 respectively.

The research house expects TM's Internet Protocol television (IPTV) service, Unifi, to be profitable only in financial year 2012 while Maxis previously indicated that it saw the 'inflection point' of the service with 500,000 subscribers.

'We note that TM's Unifi has captured over 60,000 customers since March last year and is available in 80,000 homes,' Malaysia Equity said in a note today.

It said the IPTV battle became increasingly vigorous with Astro inking a 10- year contract with Timedotcom to rollout its IPTV, capitalising on the latter's fibre network, while Maxis recently launched its IPTV service on TM''s high speed broadband. -- Bernama