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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.

  • Airtel to invest $2.5b in India this year

    Airtel to invest $2.5b in India this year

    Bharti Airtel has revealed plans to invest $2.5 billion in India during the current financial year as the company seeks to build out its 4G network to improve its dominant market position.

    During an earnings call for the company’s recent financial results, Airtel revealed it doesn’t plan to let its 71.7% decline in Q4 profit hamper its growth ambitions.

    Airtel plans to continue to focus on acquiring market share despite the impact on ARPU in the short term, Airtel’s CEO for India and South Asia Gopal Vittal said.

    The company’s ARPU shrank to 158 rupees ($2.45) during the fourth quarter from 194 rupees a year earlier, largely as a result of the price war triggered by the entry of Reliance Jio Infocomm to the market.

    Airtel has been strongly opposed to what it called Jio’s “predatory pricing” practices of offering free services as promotions to rapidly attract new users.

    Goppal said India’s smartphone penetration is expected to double in the next three years to up to 700 million, which is set to significantly impact data growth and validate the operator’s decision to focus on market share in the near term.

    Airtel also plans to invest around $500 million this financial year to develop its African operations, the report adds.

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  • ZTE’s TECS passes OpenStack Interop Challenge

    ZTE’s TECS passes OpenStack Interop Challenge

    ZTE has announced that its OpenStack-based cloud management platform has passed the Interop Challenge at the OpenStack Summit 2017.

    The Tulip Elastic Cloud System (TECS) platform successfully passed the challenge by deploying a standard Kubernetes workload, indicating that it meets the OpenStack interoperability requirements for commercial releases.

    Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

    The TECS platform has previously been involved in three Interop Challenge pre-test scenarios, covering the LAMP model of web service stacks and the Dockerswarm software container engine configuration as well as Kubernetes.

    The Interop Challenge was started in the OpenStack community in July last year to act as a set of common workload standards to be executed across the cloud environments of multiple vendors. The aim is to demonstrate that vendors’ OpenStack-powered releases are consistent and interoperable.

    ZTE is actively involved in the challenge project as part of its involvement as a key member of the OpenStack community.

    The vendor announced it plans to further promote contributions of NFV interoperability application scenarios in the OpenStack community, and to continue to participate in the Interop Challenge.

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  • Airtel Q4 profit slumps 71.7%

    Airtel Q4 profit slumps 71.7%

    India’s Bharti Airtel has reported a steep 71.7% decline in net profit for its fiscal fourth quarter to 3.73 billion rupees ($57.6 million), as the company felt the effect of competition from newcomer Reliance Jio Infocomm.

    Revenue for the quarter declined 12.1% to 219.35 billion rupees, with revenue from India down 7.1% year-on-year to 170.3 billion rupees.

    Domestic revenue was impacted by a 11.4% year-on-year decline in mobile revenue as a result of intensified competition amid the free offering from Reliance Jio.

    “The sustained predatory pricing by the new operator has led to a decline in revenue growth for the second quarter in a row. The telecom industry as a whole also witnessed a revenue decline for the first time ever on a full year basis,” Airtel CEO for India and South Asia Gopal Vittal said.

    “The deteriorating health of the industry was compounded by the tsunami of incoming voice traffic from the new operator as a result of which significant investments had to be made just to carry the incoming traffic on our network.”

    While Airtel’s Indian mobile broadband customers increased by 20.5% to 42.7 million, mobile data’s contribution to total revenue declined to 21.5% from 23.3% in the same quarter last year. Airtel’s total mobile customer base in India grew 2.9% to 273.6 million.

    Revenue from Africa grew 2.6% in constant currency terms, with data revenue up 14.5% year-on-year to 157 million, representing 17.7% of total revenue from the continent.

    The company’s Airtel Mobey mobile money service meanwhile increased its customer base to 9 million, increasing the total transaction value over the platform by 35.1% to $4 billion. Airtel’s total Africa subscriber base declined by 0.4% to 80.06 million.

    For the full year, net income declined by 37.5% to 60.77 billion rupees, with revenue down 1.1% to 954.68 billion rupees.

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  • KT, Ericsson moving forward with 5G trial network

    KT, Ericsson moving forward with 5G trial network

    South Korea’s KT is in the final stages of testing for the 5G trial network that will support next year’s Winter Olympic Games in PyeongChang.

    Technology partner Ericsson announced that the companies have recently agreed on the details of the planned deployment and optimization of a trial 5G network in the nation this year.

    The 28-GHz trial network will include a virtualized radio access network and core system.

    Ericsson and KT have also jointly been testing components of the planned trial network along the new high speed rail line linking Seoul with the Incheon International Airport. The tests included a handover between 5G base stations along the railway, and achieved a peak throughput of 4Gpbs.

    The companies now plan to jointly develop beam forming and tracking technology for 5G and 5G-LTE interoperability technology to help operators optimize capacity and coverage.

    “Stability and interoperability among multiple services, systems and device manufacturers needs to be verified well in in advance of the trial network. We are raising the bar through our collaboration with partners such as Ericsson who are leading 5G technology and standardization,” KT head of networks Seong-Mok Oh said.

    Ericsson head of networks Fredrik Jejdling added that the companies have been working closely on 5G development since signing the 5G collaboration agreement in 2015.

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  • Nepal Telecom Authority clears Ncell to launch 4G services

    Nepal Telecom Authority clears Ncell to launch 4G services

    The Nepal Telecommunications Authority (NTA) has cleared operator Ncell to launch 4G services over its existing 900-MHz and 1800-MHz spectrum holdings, paving the way for the operator to compete with Nepal Telecom.

    The telecoms regulator has informed Ncell it is clear to launch 4G services using its spectrum holdings from June 1.

    But the move goes against the decision of Nepalese parliament’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) not to allow Ncell to launch 4G services until it pays a capital gains tax the government has been demanding from the operator.

    According to the report, the committee had approached the regulator asking why Ncell had been permitted to roll out 4G services despite the tax dispute. The NTA responded that it had given the directive in the spirit of the technology neutrality spectrum policy.

    Nepal’s Development Committee had also directed NTA to allow a launch on the grounds that consumers have been negatively affected by the decision to delay providing approval, undermining the committee’s authority.

    In light of the PAC’s concerns, the regulator noted that while Nepal Telecom has been granted new spectrum to support its 4G foray, Ncell so far has not.

    The tax dispute centers on Ncell’s former shareholder TeliaSonera’s decision to exit the Nepalese market. The Sweden-headquartered operator sold its indirect majority stake in Ncell to Malaysia’s Axiata Group for $1.36 billion during a deal announced in April last year.

    The Nepalese government has demanded that capital gains tax be paid on the transaction, but because TeliaSonera had already exited the market and had disputed the assertion that the transaction is taxable, it has been leaning on Ncell to resolve the issue and potentially pay the tax on TeliaSonera’s behalf. But Ncell has resisted this pressure.

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  • Mobitel to be split from SLT and publicly listed

    Mobitel to be split from SLT and publicly listed

    Sri Lanka’s Mobitel plans to separate from parent company Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT) and list on the Colombo Stock Exchange.

    The operator is gearing up for a public listing this year with the goal of diversifying its ownership beyond SLT, citing official sources.

    The government of Sri Lanka, which owns a 49.5% stake in SLT, plans to exit partially or fully from Mobitel as part of a broader sell-off of its investments in state-owned enterprises.

    The government is seeking to raise at least $1 billion to settle what it says is uneconomical debt it inherited from its predecessor.

    Minister of telecommunications and digital infrastructure Harin Fernando meanwhile told that the separation is also aimed at helping tackle overcrowding in the nation’s telecoms industry and improving the competitiveness of Mobitel.

    Mobitel commenced operations in 1993 and became a fully-owned subsidiary of SLT in 2002. The company currently accounts for around 45% of SLT’s annual revenues, the highest contribution among the group’s eight subsidiaries.

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  • 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.”

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  • 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.

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  • 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.”

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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