Retail News CRM

Category: Telecom

Retail News Asia is committed to providing both local and global retailers with the latest Telecom & Telco news throughout the Asian market. This on a daily base.

  • StarHub Q1 profit falls 21%

    StarHub Q1 profit falls 21%

    Singapore’s StarHub has reported a 21% year-on-year decline in net profit for the first quarter to S$73 million ($51.9 million), partly as a result of declining revenue from pay TV and mobile services.

    Revenue for the quarter increased marginally to S$592 million, but service revenue declined 1% to S$537 million, the company said.

    Mobile revenue was down 1% to S$296 million, despite net additions of 43,000 pre-paid customers and 48,000 post-paid subscribers. Prepaid and post-paid ARPU also both declined by S$2, to S$15 and S$67 respectively.

    StarHub’s Pay TV revenue meanwhile fell 7% to S$88 million as a result of a decrease in the operator’s total pay TV subscriber base of 41,000 to around 487,000 households. This was despite a low 0.9% churn rate.

    Broadband revenue increased slightly to S$54 million, even as residential broadband customers fell by 3,000 to 470,000 households.

    Enterprise fixed revenue increased 3% year-on-year to S$99 million, with data and internet services contributing S$88 million of this while enterprise voice revenue fell 19% to S11 million.

    The declining pay TV subscriber base meanwhile led to a roughly 12,000 household reduction in StarHub’s triple play or higher customer base to 338,000.

    Based on the results and the current economic outlook, StarHub said it expects service revenue for the year to be roughly flat, and has set a projected capex budget of around 13% of total revenue.

    “We have made the necessary investments in the recent spectrum auction to continue delivering quality mobile services to our increasing Mobile base. The acquired spectrum will also facilitate our roadmap towards 5G,” StarHub CEO Tan Tong Hai said.

    Driving growth in the enterprise business remains our priority and we are on track to introduce new cyber security, IoT and smart retail solutions to the market. We will grow our enterprise digital services offerings with our latest strategic management addition.”

    Lees ook:

  • Underserved Indonesian Areas to be Connected via Thaicom and Axiata Partners

    Underserved Indonesian Areas to be Connected via Thaicom and Axiata Partners

    The partners inked the deal for Axiata Business Services to purchase the remaining capacity on IPSTAR over Indonesia to deliver Axiata’s operating company, PT XL Axiata Tbk (“XL”), more than 1 Gbps High Throughput Satellite (HTS) capacity for the provision of broadband services in Indonesia. According to the terms of the agreement, Axiata Business Services will use capacity of up to seven Ku-band shaped and spot beams on the IPSTAR-1 broadband satellite located at 119.5°E for the provision of broadband services in Indonesia, including broadband access direct to residential and enterprise premises, and cellular network backhaul.

    The IPSTAR-1 satellite was launched in 2005 and was the first HTS ever launched into orbit. IPSTAR cellular backhaul and direct to premise broadband connectivity provides telecom operators with the ability to expand their networks, launch new broadband services and reach underserved areas quickly and cost-effectively.

    Asri Hassan Sabri, Group Chief Business Operations Officer of Axiata, reported that his company is leveraging on Thaicom’s capabilities in Asia to grow their enterprise business quickly and flexibly, all the while providing reliable broadband services to all potential customers, regardless of their location. Where terrestrial-based connectivity is limited or unavailable, HTS connectivity serves as an enabler to unlock the digital ecosystem for new market opportunities. As the world’s first ever HTS, launched in 2005, Thaicom’s IPSTAR helps us to connect users in remote and underserved areas of Indonesia cost-effectively.

    Dian Siswarini, Chief Executive Officer of XL, added that as the biggest archipelago in the world, there are many areas and islands in Indonesia that have not been served by Internet services as of yet.The availability of HTS will help to cover these unserved areas with considerable economic potential. On top of that, the company will be able to support the local community’s economic growth and Indonesian government’s vision to accelerate the national development of digital economy across Indonesia.

    Dominic P Arena, Group Chief Strategy Officer of Axiata, indicated that this HTS partnership is highly strategic for Axiata and the beginning of what all believe can become a core future broadband delivery platform for the operating companies to deliver broadband connectivity, media and entertainment, IoT and other digital services to enterprise and consumer home segments. More importantly, this partnership allows the firm to provide the best connectivity option and reach to underserved communities, in line with Axiata’s broader goal of advancing Asia by piecing together the best in innovation, connectivity and talent.

  • NVIDIA, Facebook team up on AI

    NVIDIA, Facebook team up on AI

    NVIDIA and Facebook are working together to advance artificial intelligence with Caffe2, a new AI deep learning framework contributed by Facebook to the open-source community.

    Facebook is developing new AI systems to help manage this information so people can better understand the world and more effectively communicate, even as the volume of information increases.

    Caffe2 allows developers and researchers to create large-scale distributed training scenarios and build machine learning applications for edge devices.

    Increasingly, the processing of lightning-fast AI services requires GPU-accelerated computing, such as that offered by Facebook’s Big Basin servers, as well as highly optimized deep learning software that can leverage the full capability of the accelerated hardware.

    “NVIDIA and Facebook are delivering AI acceleration through our work on the Caffe2 deep learning framework,” said Kristin Bryson, PR director for the data center business at NVIDIA.

    “Thanks to our joint engineering, we’ve fine-tuned Caffe2 from the ground up to take full advantage of the NVIDIA GPU deep learning platform,” said Bryson.

    Caffe2 uses the latest NVIDIA Deep Learning SDK libraries — cuDNN, cuBLAS and NCCL — to deliver high-performance, multi-GPU accelerated training and inference.

    Bryson said Caffe2 is designed to be a fast, scalable and portable deep learning framework. It delivers near-linear scaling of deep learning training with 57x throughput acceleration on eight networked Facebook Big Basin AI servers with 64 NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPU accelerators. This means developers can train and iterate AI models faster than ever.

    As part of the two companies’ collaboration, the NVIDIA DGX-1 AI supercomputer will be the first AI system to offer Caffe2 within the optimized software stack for deep learning. Together, DGX-1 and Caffe2 deliver high performance and fast training.

    “Through NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Institute, we’ve helped more than 10,000 developers worldwide learn to use frameworks to design, train and deploy neural network-powered machine learning for a variety intelligent applications and services,” said Bryson.

  • Ultrafast Fibre taps Dimension Data for cloud services

    Ultrafast Fibre taps Dimension Data for cloud services

    New Zealand’s Ultrafast Fibre Limited, one of the companies building the nationwide Ultrafast Broadband (UFB) fiber network, has appointed Dimension Data as its sole provider of cloud services.

    The company is consolidating its cloud provider base in order to reduce costs, increase information security, and to optimize compute flexibility across the business.

    Dimension Data will host all of Ultrafast Fibre’s data assets and applications within their Managed Cloud Platform (MCP) in Hamilton, including communications, business process applications, data warehouse and geographic information systems.

    Hamilton-based Ultrafast Fibre – which built and operates the UFB across the Waikato, Bay of Plenty and Taranaki – recently embarked on a process to select a single provider for all cloud services.

    “Working with Dimension Data as our single cloud provider has delivered less complexity, an increased platform control and improved cost management by having all of our assets in one place by making things simple and fast,” Ultrafast Fibre business support manager Peter Knedler said.

    “The ability to control platforms and data assets through Dimension Data’s Self Service Real Time Cloud Control Portal has already delivered business benefits which is a real bonus, because it allows Ultrafast Fibre to directly control our cloud assets in real time without the need for additional professional service requests,” Knedler said.

    Ultrafast Fibre also required the flexibility to scale up or down its cloud capacity on demand and only pay for what it used.

    This project to simplify and secure Cloud assets coincides with Ultrafast Fibre entering an exciting phase of fiber connections growth, having already successfully completed deployment of approximately 3,000 kilometers of fiber to eight central North Island cities and towns under the first tranche of the government’s

    Ultrafast Broadband initiative. Ultrafast Fibre has recently been awarded a new contract to connect a further 12 central North Island communities as part of the UFB2 rollout.

    Lees ook:

  • Orange Business launches public cloud suite in APAC

    Orange Business launches public cloud suite in APAC

    Orange Business Services, a subsidiary of French multinational telecoms operator Orange, has launched its suite of global public cloud services in Asia Pacific.

    The new suite consists of three pillars – the Flexible Engine IaaS/PaaS public cloud platform developed in partnership with Huawei, professional services to assist customers in their migration, and managed services to operate customer applications and legacy systems.

    The suite will enable enterprises to digitally transform their business operations and support Asian businesses in their expansion plans across China, Southeast Asia and Europe. It also supports European companies with their business development across Southeast Asia and China.

    Already available in Europe, the services will continue to be rolled out in the US in 2017 and in the Middle East and Africa in 2018.

    “Businesses around the globe recognize that it is imperative for them to digitally transform in order to remain competitive,” says Helmut Reisinger, executive vice president for International Business, Orange Business Services.

    “Cloud adoption continues to be one of their top technology focus for 2017 as they seek to digitally transform their infrastructure. However, this has become a significant challenge due to infrastructure constraints, security concerns and limits in scalability especially for multinational enterprises.”

    Lees ook:

  • Tata Communications posts $32.5m Q4 loss

    Tata Communications posts $32.5m Q4 loss

    Tata Communications has reported a 2.09 billion rupee ($32.5 million) net loss for the fourth quarter, with earnings impacted by issues including the impact of the demonetization of India’s 500 and 1000 rupee banknotes.

    Gross revenue fell 10% year-on-year to 43 billion rupees, with ebitda down 35.9% over the same period to 5.03 billion rupees.

    Besides the effect of demonetization, revenue was negatively impacted by the loss of revenue arising from the sale of 17 data centers in India and Singapore for $663 million in May last year.

    Cable repair costs, employee-related expenses and legal fees associated with the court battle over NTT DoCoMo’s stake in the Tata DoCoMo joint venture also contributed to the decline.

    With the Delhi High Court recently declaring the validity of the settlement agreement between Tata Teleservices, holding company Tata Sons and DoCoMo, entitling the Japanese operator to collect the $1.18 billion award reached in an earlier settlement agreement, Tata Communications said it has made a provision of 8.72 billion rupees for the current quarter.

    For the full year, Tata Communications reported a net profit of 12.23 billion rupees, or $184 million in US dollar terms, as well as 5.2% lower gross revenue of 194.9 billion rupees.

    “Market demand for our services remain strong and we continue to increase our wallet share with large global enterprises,” Tata Communications CEO Vinod Kumar commented.

    “The conclusion of the Data Center and Neotel deals makes us stronger, more agile. This will help drive focus and momentum into our evolution from a traditional telco to a next generation digital enablement provider.”

  • PLDT secures 25-year franchise extension

    PLDT secures 25-year franchise extension

    The Philippines’ PLDT has announced that wireless subsidiary Smart has secured a 25-year extension to its franchise.

    President Rodrigo Duterte has signed into law a new Act that effectively extends Smart’s franchise until 2042.

    The franchise allows Smart to deploy, maintain, lease and operate integrated domsetic and international telecommunications services nationwide.

    New details have also reportedly been added to ensure Smart receives equal access to any future incentives granted to new players in the market and to exempt the operator from paying duties or taxes on telecoms equipment.

    The extension will take effect 15 days after publication of the franchise law in a newspaper of general circulation, something PLDT said it intends to effectuate.

    As half of the Philippines’ duopoly of mobile operators, PLDT’s Smart is a major player with around 63 million mobile subscribers as of the end of last year.

    But the Philippines has long been seeking to have a third player enter the market to enhance competition, and is planning to conduct a spectrum auction open only to potential new market entrants later this year.

    Rival operator Globe Telecom’s current concession runs until 2030.

    Lees ook:

    Lees ook:

    Lees ook:

  • Telco API revenues set to reach $207b by 2022

    Telco API revenues set to reach $207b by 2022

    Global revenues from telecommunications application programming interfaces (APIs) is on track to reach $207 billion worldwide by 2022, Research and Markets has predicted.

    A new report from the research firm finds that the telco API market has significantly matured in recent years. But much of the market activity has so far been limited to larger operators in developed countries, leaving significant room for growth in emerging markets.

    During the past five years, operators have leveraged APIs to derive wholesale transaction revenues from third-parties such as OTT providers and enterprises, as well as communication-enabled application revenue, the report states.

    Operators have the potential to achieve incremental growth by providing a variety of services and application support, such as robo and unwanted call blocking services to support do not call registries and compliance with consumer protection regulation.

    But in the long term, revenue from traditional consumer centric services supported from telecom APIs is expected to level off, with revenue associated with IoT services becoming the new markte driver.

    The report predicts that communication-enabled network revenue will plateau as IoT network support revenue becomes a more substantial revenue component for Telecom APIs by 2025.

    Lees ook:

  • Axiata to lease capacity on IPSTAR-1 for Indonesia

    Axiata to lease capacity on IPSTAR-1 for Indonesia

    Malaysia’s Axiata Group has signed a four-year agreement to lease capacity over Thaicom’s IPSTAR-1 satellite for the provision of broadband services in Indonesia.

    Subsidiary Axiata Business Services will purchase the remaining capacity on the broadband satellite, located at 119.5° east.

    Thaicom’s IPSTAR unit will provide multi-transponder 1Gbps high throughput satellite (HTS) capacity under the contract.

    As well as direct home and enterprise broadband access, Axiata plans to use the capacity for mobile backhaul.

    “We are leveraging on Thaicom’s capabilities in Asia to grow our enterprise business quickly and flexibly while providing reliable broadband services to all potential customers regardless of location,” said Axiata group chief business operations officer Asri Hassan Sabri said.

    “Where terrestrial-based connectivity is limited or unavailable, HTS connectivity serves as an enabler to unlock the digital ecosystem for new market opportunities… Thaicom’s IPSTAR helps us to connect users in remote and underserved areas of Indonesia cost-effectively. We are confident that the partnership will enable us to continue to grow our business faster without infrastructure limitations.”

    IPSTAR-1, also known as THAICOM-4, was the first HTS satellite launched worldwide in 2005, with a capacity of 45Gbps. It includes 87 Ku-band transponders and 10 Ka-band transponders.

    Lees ook:

    Lees ook:

  • Oracle, Fujitsu launch public cloud services in Japan

    Oracle, Fujitsu launch public cloud services in Japan

    Fujitsu and Oracle Japan have launched Oracle Cloud Platform services, including Oracle Database Cloud Service, via a Fujitsu data center, a first for Japan.

    Oracle and Fujitsu have a long history of collaboration when it comes to processors, servers, and software. This synergy now extends to the data center, where Oracle’s cloud services will be available locally to Japanese customers backed by Fujitsu.

    Fujitsu has the largest number of Oracle-certified Oracle Cloud engineers in Japan, and offers a coordinated portfolio of services to assist in the deployment and operations of Oracle Public Cloud, to help organizations build new modern cloud-based solutions and transition their enterprise systems, including mission-critical operations, to the cloud.

    Fujitsu and Oracle formed a strategic alliance in July last year, based on a strategic collaboration to deliver enterprise-grade, world-class cloud services to customers in Japan and their subsidiaries around the world.

    Together with making Oracle Public Cloud services available from Fujitsu’s robust and reliable data center in Japan, can now be used as part of Fujitsu Cloud Service K5, Fujitsu’s public cloud service.

    “The Oracle Cloud Platform running in Fujitsu’s Japan datacenter alongside Fujitsu Cloud Service K5 DB powered by Oracle Cloud is a natural continuation of the three decade history Oracle and Fujitsu have working together to help customers achieve competitive advantage,” said Edward Screven, Chief Corporate Architect, Oracle.

    “By combining Fujitsu’s system integration expertise with Oracle’s cloud services, Fujitsu and Oracle will accelerate the transition of our joint customers’ enterprise systems to cloud.”

    Oracle Cloud offers a complete range of public cloud services across SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. Oracle Cloud Platform, which includes Oracle’s analytics, application development, data management, and integration services, has experienced steady growth, adding thousands of customers in fiscal 2017.

    Lees ook:

  • Nokia forms smart city alliance with Tianfu New Area

    Nokia forms smart city alliance with Tianfu New Area

    Nokia has signed an agreement with the Tianfu New Area Chengdu Administrative Committee to collaborate on digital city development.

    Under the agreement, both parties will collaborate on the construction of a data center and related telecoms infrastructure, deploy an IoT trial network in the city and jointly incubate IoT applications and devices.

    The partnership will also involve the deployment of an end-to-end optical network in the Tianfu New Area of Chengdu – one of the three most populous cities in Western China with an urban population of over 10.1 million.

    “The TianFu New Area development project presents an exciting opportunity to build a smart city – or actually a smart region – from the ground up,” Nokia president of Greater China Mike Wang said.

    “The communications network will serve as the brain and nervous system of the smart city, and we welcome the opportunity to apply Nokia’s technology and know-how to the challenge of building the digital infrastructure that will support this groundbreaking effort.”

    Nokia will be following its Smart City Playbook strategy for the project. This strategy was launched in late 2016 and outlines best practices for smart cities.

    The agreement also marks a key development in Nokia’s efforts to expand its customer base outside of the traditional telecoms sphere.

    The Tianfu New Area modernization project was launched in late 2011. It covers three cities, seven counties and 37 towns and villages.

    Lees ook:

  • Viettel plans to expand to Indonesia, Nigeria

    Viettel plans to expand to Indonesia, Nigeria

    Vietnam’s Viettel is reportedly eyeing a foray into Indonesia and Nigeria as part of its international expansion drive.

    The military-run operator’s Viettel Global subsidiary is planning to enter the two markets due to their large populations.

    As of June last year, Indonesia had a population of 258 million while Nigeria had a population of 187 million. Viettel expects that this large addressable market will help establish the conditions that would allow it to expand to other markets in the future.

    Viettel Global had a combined 24 million subscribers in nine overseas markets – Laos, Cambodia, East Timor, Cameroon, Haiti, Mozambique, Burundi, Peru, and Tanzania. The company reported revenue of $1.04 billion last year and is targeting $1.3 billion in revenue this year.

    Viettel is also moving to enter the Myanmar market, having won the tender to be the 49%-owned partner to a consortium of local ICT companies that will become the market’s fourth operator.

    But the company is facing tough competition in Africa from rivals such as Orange, MTN, Movistar, Claro, Digicel, and Axiata.

    Lees ook:

  • Robi completes LTE trial in Dhaka

    Robi completes LTE trial in Dhaka

    Bangladesh’s Robi Axiata is gearing up to launch 4G services after completing a successful trial of the technology in conjunction with Ericsson.

    The operator conducted an LTE demonstration using a combination of 1800-MHz and 2100-MHz spectrum in Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka, achieving download speeds of over 90Mbps.

    Ericsson provided cutting-edge base station, radio units and baseband technologies for the trial, the companies said.

    The demonstration was also intended to explore how the technology can help facilitate adoption of high-speed broadband applications including HDTV and videoconferencing.

    “Although there are some barriers to the adoption of 4G/LTE technology such as low penetration of compatible smartphones, we recognize and appreciate our customers’ growing demand for high speed internet which can only be served using this technology,” Robi Axiata CEO Mahtab Uddin Ahmed said.

    “Unfortunately, we feel the licensing framework proposed by the government make the business case for 4G unviable in Bangladesh. However, we are very keen on introducing this technology in our telecom market considering the customers’ interest… We hope the government will kindly consider revising the licensing framework to make it more enabling for 4G business.”

    Last month, Bangladesh’s regulator prepared its guidelines for the proposed 4G licensing regime for the nation.

    These include requiring operators to pay a 15% gross revenue share – compared to 5.5% for 2G and 3G services – as well as a 150 million taka ($1.8 million) 15-year license fee and a further 75 million taka in annual fees.

    Bangladesh is the only country among its neighbors to have yet to introduce 4G services.

    Lees ook:

  • Cisco to buy Viptela for $610m

    Cisco to buy Viptela for $610m

    Cisco’s has announced plans to acquire Viptela and combine the San-Jose-based vendor’s SD-WAN technology with its own efforts, moving further toward a software model that produces more reliably recurring revenue.

    SD-WAN is emerging as this year’s big networking, taking the fabric of software defined networking and turning it into an enterprise-focused product.

    SD-WANs promise to redefine the way enterprises build and operate their wide area networks, making it easier to to hook up branch locations, data centers, and company headquarters with flexible infrastructure.

    Cisco will be paying $610 million in cash and assumed equity awards for the acquisition. Viptela’s talent will join the company’s Enterprise Routing team, working with them to enhance Cisco’s SD-WAN technology with their own.  The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2017.

  • Axiata taps Thaicom satellite to connect remote areas of Indonesia

    Axiata taps Thaicom satellite to connect remote areas of Indonesia

    The deal allows Axiata Business Services to purchase the remaining capacity on the IPSTAR-1 broadband satellite so that its operating company, PT XL Axiata Tbk (XL), can deliver more than one gigabit per second of High Throughput Satellite (HTS) capacity for broadband services in Indonesia.

    Axiata Business Services will use up to seven Ku-band shaped and spot beams on IPSTAR-1 located at 119.5 degree east to provide services including broadband access directly to residential and enterprise premises.

    “We are leveraging Thaicom’s capabilities in Asia to grow our enterprise business quickly and flexibly while providing reliable broadband services to all potential customers, regardless of location,” said Axiata group chief business operations officer Asri Hassan Sabri.

    “Where terrestrial-based connectivity is limited or unavailable, HTS connectivity serves as an enabler to unlock the digital ecosystem for new market opportunities,” he said. “As the world’s first-ever HTS, launched in 2005, Thaicom’s IPSTAR helps us connect users in remote and underserved areas of Indonesia cost-effectively. We are confident that the partnership will enable us to continue to grow our business faster without infrastructure limitations.”

    XL chief executive Dian Siswarini noted that many areas and islands in Indonesia are still without Internet access.

    “We believe the availability of HTS will help us to cover these unserved areas with considerable economic potential. On top of that, it will enable us to support the local community’s economic growth and the Indonesian government’s vision to accelerate the national development of digital economy across Indonesia.”

    Thaicom chief commercial officer Patompob Suwansiri thanked Axiata for its “trust” in inking the deal.

    “We are committed to working with leading mobile-network operators throughout Asia-Pacific to facilitate the growth of wireless broadband and other digital services in remote and underserved areas.”