Four years after the first convoy of bulldozers mowed down palm oil trees on what is now Cyberjaya, the pace of development seems less frantic.

There are, of course, roads and brand-new buildings and presumably miles and miles of fibre-optic cables zigzagging beneath the red earth frantically pumping and receiving zillions of bytes of information and e-mails to and from all over the world hourly.

Many of the services will be centrally controlled such as the functioning of traffic lights, bus schedules and even services to offices and homes will be managed this way.

Above ground, the pace seems rather slower and one can't feel the buzzing pace of construction that would indicate hundreds of Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC)-status companies setting up office in the few thousand hectares that supposedly determines Malaysia's future.

And I say a few thousand hectares because the MSC isn't really a 15km x 50km corridor. It's really just six pockets of designated areas; The Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC), Technology Park Malaysia, the UPM-MTDC incubator centre, Cyberjaya, the federal government's administrative center at Putrajaya and the Kuala Lumpur International Airport (though who would want to set up a high-tech office next to an airport and pay toll at least four times a day is anyone's guess).

Cyberjaya is perhaps the biggest with a 2,885 flagship development zones divided into three precincts, Enterprise (558 hectares), Commercial (173 hectares), Residential (1,036 hectares) and Recreational and Public areas (1,088 hectares).

Hi-tech and modern

But, don't take my word for it. Take a drive to Cyberjaya. Go on. It'll do you good to get out of the city for a country drive or an excuse to skive off work.

So what is it that you expect to see in Cyberjaya? Frantic pace of development? High technology everywhere? Names of fast food chains blazing in neon signage? Bars and restaurants packed with IT types, local and foreign?

Before you visit and come away disappointed, let me tell you, you won't find any of these things. You will however see blobs of 'designer' buildings here and there showing great promise of the much-vaunted 'K-economy'.

You'll see pockets of land slowly being cleared and leveled for a building or two and a few tipper and cement trucks will spread dust on your windscreen.

The buildings do look nice though, modern and high-tech. There's a Telekom Malaysia (TM) building (yet another). With so many buildings in and around KL, one wonders if TM is a real estate developer or a telecommunications provider.

A few clusters of incubator buildings in a couple of areas, some near the headquarters of the Multimedia Development Corporation, sentinel of the MSC, and another few blocks on the other side of the main thoroughfare that seems to split Cyberjaya into two, but not really.

You'll see apartments being built too, promising broadband access for future occupants and there's the Multimedia University which doesn't look very high-tech with undergarments hanging out of the hostel windows since the architects designed the layout with the hostels to the front forming a semi-circle around the university's academic buildings.

Why on earth did they do that, you may well ask and you may well never get an answer. It's a Telekom Malaysia university anyway, so I'll leave the reasoning to your imagination.

Ghastly flyover

Within the university campus, there's another incubator centre with their tenants complaining about being exhibits for the benefit of foreign visitors tagging behind the sentinel's reps and the frequent disturbances they have to endure as a result.

Century Square, a neat cluster of two buildings (with another block nearing completion) looks good. And they seem well occupied.

I remember three flyovers, one ghastly with gilded ornamental pillars, rather incongruous in the so-called modern, high-tech environment.

Most importantly, finding food is tough and this I discovered while visiting friends in their spanking brand new office in Century Square.

As an MSC company, they had to move to Cyberjaya or anyone of the four designated pockets or lose the MSC status they so value. Regardless that the sentinel sees them only as a statistic to boast and have never bothered to send a representative to see how these guys are settling down.

They chose Cyberjaya because for RM2,000 per month, they get two megabit ADSL lines and office rental is a relatively cheap at RM2.50 per square foot as opposed to the RM3.40 price tag at Technology Park Malaysia and the RM6 at the KLCC's Petronas Twin Towers.

The company spent half-a-million big ones on an impressive office. Hopefully the MSC status will prove worthwhile for them and they're hoping for that courtesy visit by a sentinel rep.

Survival kit

But it's lunch time and where's the cafeteria, I need to eat.

"Well, we could go to the Multimedia Development Corporation's cafeteria and eat the quite horrible food," says the friend.

"Or drive over to Dengkil."

"All that trouble to eat?" I ask.

Someone shows me a box with the words, 'MSC Survival Kit' written big and bold on all sides.

"A present from my sister after telling her I was joining an MSC company in Cyberjaya," he laughs.

We all laugh.

Another brings out a tiffin carrier and another shows off a lunch box and we all laugh again, only louder at the ludicrousness of the situation.

And I get to eat someone's left-over nasi lemak heated in a spanking new microwave oven.

Essential requirements to be an MSC status company are lunch boxes, microwave and fridge - something they don't tell you before you move in.

High cost

But there is hope.

A new bus terminal is about to be completed where a fast-food chain is said to be setting up shop with other eating joints and soon, like their Silicon Valley counterparts, Cyberjaya techies can chomp on junk food while working 24 hours a day seven days a week.

And when the fast KL-KLIA rail link is ready, it'll stop in Putrajaya with adequate bus services to the Cyberjaya terminal. But I suspect a commuter would be paying an arm and a leg to hop on board to get to work.

On one hand there is hope that a vast majority of the 460 MSC status companies (as of March 10, 2001) will find the wherewithal to move in, but on the other, some would rather lose the status than cope with the difficulties and the high cost of traveling, transport and food for their valued staff.

There you have it. A quick tour of Cyberjaya. Perhaps moving to Singapore offers more convenience.

SHUF SHUKUR, an Information Technology journalist, is one of the oldest cyber-surfers in town.