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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.

  • Idea to expand 4G to nine more circles

    Idea to expand 4G to nine more circles

    India’s third largest mobile operator Idea Cellular has revealed plans to expand its 4G network to nine additional telecoms circles by March next year.

    The operator plans to add around 57,000 new 4G cell sites this year alone.

    With the expansion, Idea Cellular plans to launch of 4G in the circles of Uttar Pradesh East and West, Gujarat, Mumbai, Bihar, Rajasthan, West Bengal, Assam and Jammu & Kashmir.

    This will take Idea’s total 4G footprint to 20 of India’s 22 telecoms circles. The 20 circles together account for 94% of Idea Cellular’s revenue and 90% of all industry revenue.

    Idea is using the spectrum it acquired in the recent $9.8 billion spectrum auction to pursue the 4G expansion.

    India’s 4G market is heating up due to the entry into the market of disruptive Pan-Indian 4G operator Reliance Jio Infocomm.

    Idea’s wireless broadband network currently spans 17 circles, with the operator aiming to achieve a total of 250,000 sites this financial year.

    To better compete against Reliance Jio, Idea is also increasingly pursuing a content strategy, starting with branded games. The operator plans to expand to movie and music services in the near future.

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  • Malaysia’s MMU, Teradata ink pact on big data analytics skills

    Malaysia’s MMU, Teradata ink pact on big data analytics skills

    Multimedia University, Malaysia (MMU) and Teradata have announced a strategic partnership to collaborate on education and research in an effort to cultivate the next generation of data science professionals and experts in Malaysia.

    Through this co-operation, MMU will gain access to the Teradata University Network (TUN), a web-based portal that provides complementary teaching and learning tools used by more than 45,000 students around the world to share expertise, access knowledge as well as information on how to enhance both curriculum and align research to the current industry needs.

    Teradata University Network currently has over 5,500 registered faculty members, from over 2,400 universities, in 115 countries, with thousands of student users.

    A key to the success of Teradata University Network is that it is led by academics to ensure the content will meet the needs of today’s classrooms.

    Leveraging the partnership, MMU’s Faculty of Computing and Informatics will offer a Data Science Specialization as part of its Bachelor of Computer Science degree.

    This step was taken following the formalization of a Data Science Institute (DSI) at MMU last month designed to cater to both research and industry engagement of MMU’s expertise in this area.

    “This MoU facilitates greater input from a leading industry player, and Teradata has committed to provide experts to support exposure to our students and staff alike to its services and solutions,” said MMU president Ahmad Rafi Mohamed Eshaq.

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  • Comptel unveils intelligent UIs for digital services LCM

    Comptel unveils intelligent UIs for digital services LCM

    Comptel has added a set of operational user interfaces (UIs) to its FlowOne V solution, tailored for specific user groups within service providers.

    The UIs are designed to increase productivity, empower the critical service orchestration processes behind frictionless delivery of end-to-end virtualized services, and accelerate time-to-market.

    FlowOne V incorporates virtualized network function (VNF) onboarding and service chaining, digital service design and orchestration, and dynamic, closed-loop service assurance.

    By providing a holistic, end-to-end view and orchestration of digital services, it allows operators to transform their current service delivery processes by connecting the cloud and physical resources (compute, storage, network) with business management processes and systems (customer care, billing, customer order management).

    With the addition of four new intuitive UIs called “Hubs,” FlowOne V translates the service orchestration process into routine tasks, specific to individual user groups.

    The UIs strengthen the solution with inbuilt intelligence, including the normalization of service terminology between multiple platforms to make them easily manageable and reusable components, and the validation of service specifications to avoid unnecessary mistakes.

    “Intuitive operational UIs are a key factor for increasing the speed at which services can be developed, verified, deployed and improved – consequently reducing time-to-profit and increasing customer satisfaction,” said Antti Koskela, EVP of Comptel.

    “By adding this new functionality to FlowOne V, we’ve created a new paradigm for operationally managing NFV and SDN, empowering service providers to more effectively specify, test and deliver services across virtual, physical and IT domains,” said Koskella.

    The four new UIs include DesignHub, OrderHub, LifecycleHub, and SystemHub.

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  • Nokia unveils machine learning-powered customer experience solutions

    Nokia unveils machine learning-powered customer experience solutions

    Nokia has powered major updates to its Motive Customer eXperience Solutions (CXS) software portfolio, promising communications service providers with advanced machine learning capabilities to reduce costs and improve customer experiences.

    Nokia Motive Service Management Platform (SMP) 7.0 and Motive Care Analytics (CAL) 2.0 use machine-learning algorithms developed by Nokia Bell labs — advanced capabilities that give computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed.

    With support for machine learning in its CXS portfolio, Nokia aims to set a new standard for proactive care in the industry, dramatically improving the detection, troubleshooting and resolution of subscriber issues.

    Nokia Motive SMP 7.0 features Dynamic Intelligent Workflows, a new self-optimizing system that determines the ideal sequence of tasks that deliver the highest probability of resolving billing, subscription and network service issues in the shortest amount of time.

    By analyzing data from previous workflow executions, the network, customer premises equipment, and trouble tickets, this capability enables service providers to quickly find the optimal remediation to issues when subscribers contact help desk agents or use self-care.

    Nokia Motive CAL 2.0 is the first solution of its kind that automatically correlates customer help desk calls and self-care actions with network, service and third-party application topologies to identify call anomalies, such as unusual patterns in help desk calls that indicate the location of customer-impacting network and service issues.

    Together, Motive SMP 7.0 and Motive CAL 2.0 help service providers lower costs by reducing average help desk handling times 5% to15% and eliminating inappropriate truck rolls (dispatching a service technician to a customer location) related to network outages by as much as 90%.

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  • YTL launches 4G LTE data, VoLTE services

    YTL launches 4G LTE data, VoLTE services

    YTL Communications in Malaysia has deployed Elitecore’s Revenue and Customer Management (RCM) Platform to roll out its 4G LTE high speed data & VoLTE services.

    The platform will enable the operator to roll out new business models like, HD Voice (VoLTE), Enterprise LTE and LTE Roaming, in addition to the Double Double buckets, one for wireless broadband and another for mobile internet, VoLTE and data services bundled with devices.

    YTL Communications said it is the only operator in Asia Pacific to commercially launch nationwide Voice over LTE (VoLTE) services.

    Elitecore’s NFV ready and Virtualized platform comprises of integrated policy and charging, 3GPP AAA, convergent billing, fulfillment, mobile self-care catering to voice, data and VAS services supporting multiple networks such as LTE, Wi-Fi and Wimax.

    “Elitecore’s product roadmap alignment with YTL’s business vision and proven experience in convergent billing and integrated policy and charging supports our growth strategy and helped us migrate from our legacy billing and operational support systems,” said Ali Tabassi, COO of YTL Communications. “The platform offers high agility for faster time-to-market and feature rich functionalities.”

    Elitecore said its RCM is a modular and feature ready platform that offers operators the speed and flexibility to roll out, new monetization and personalization use cases needed to innovate in next-generation data services. The platform promises significant contribution to capex and AMC cost reduction.

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  • Australia’s nbn selects FTTC supplier

    Australia’s nbn selects FTTC supplier

    Australia’s nbn – the company building the National Broadband Network – has selected NetComm Wireless to supply equipment for the fiber to the curb (FTTC) proportion of the rollout.

    NetComm Wireless will supply the distribution point units for the deployment, which will be one of the world’s first wide-scale rollouts of FTTC technology.

    FTTC involves delivering fiber to the telecoms pit outside a building, using existing copper lines from the pit to the home. This technique brings fiber closer to the end-user than FTTN.

    NetComm Wireless, a Sydney-based equipment supplier, appears to have beaten out global vendors such as existing NBN partner Nokia for the contract.

    The agreement follows successful trials of FTTC in Sydney and Melbourne conducted by nbn, which achieved end-user speeds of 100/40Mbps using VDSL vectoring technology.

    “nbn is delighted to bring NetComm Wireless on board as a technology partner. We have tested FTTC over the past year and we’re confident we can now deploy the technology in areas where it makes better sense from a customer experience, deployment efficiency and cost perspective,” nbn Chief Network Engineering Officer Paul Ryan said.

    “Delivering FTTC will not only allow us to deliver speeds of up to 100/40Mbps using VDSL but will also allow us to offer even faster speeds in the future with some of the new technologies that are becoming available.”

    But industry groups such as Internet Australia have been sharply critical of the current government’s decision to switch from a planned all-FTTP deployment for the vast majority of the network to a multi-technology mix making use of existing copper last mile connections.

    Critics of the decision have argued that the multi-technology mix model will require further expense to upgrade rapidly aging copper with fiber for the last mile in 10-15 years if not sooner.

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  • Microsoft extends CityNext project to Hong Kong

    Microsoft extends CityNext project to Hong Kong

    Microsoft has extended its global CityNext smart city initiative to Hong Kong and is seeking local partners to collaborate.

    Through the CityNext initiative, Microsoft is working with partners including system integrators to deliver smart city offerings to businesses and governments.

    Microsoft held an industry event in Hong Kong last week to discuss the transformative potential of intelligent systems and data analytics in smart city applications. Over 100 channel partners and potential customers attended.

    Speaking at the event, Microsoft Hong Kong national CTO Fred Sheu said the CityNext program will help governments deliver digital services to ensure their citizens enjoy healthier lives, as well as access to high-quality education and other critical needs.

    “Together with our partners, we can transform a city’s operations and infrastructure, engage citizens and accelerate innovation to create truly sustainable cities — where citizens, businesses and governments work alongside one another for a better tomorrow,” he said.

    “Through CityNext, we provide solutions that focus the most powerful modern technology — cloud, big data, mobile, and social technologies — on the city’s most pressing issues. For example, two critical components of any smart city are machine learning and IoT, which we are proud to offer to our partners via our much-heralded Azure cloud platform.”

    Microsoft CTO for data insights John Nisi added that the use of intelligent systems is helping businesses and governments re-imagine the value chain.

    “Modern businesses faced with economic uncertainty and disruptive competitors can leverage analytics and predictive data to create new revenue streams and opportunities that will allow them to thrive in the digital era,” he said.

    According to Sheu, more than 300 partners worldwide have already signed up for the CityNext program. In Hong Kong, over 10 partners have joined the program to provide smart healthcare, smart building, smart government and geographical information system (GIS) offerings and the like.

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  • China Telecom Shanghai, Huawei test network slicing

    China Telecom Shanghai, Huawei test network slicing

    China Telecom Shanghai and Huawei have successfully jointly implemented access network slicing at a trial site.

    The trial solution involves slicing the access network into home, enterprise and campus connections, which will potentially allow the operator to use a single network to deliver all types of services.

    OLT hardware is shared by services, and all segments are isolated from each other in order to improve service reliability and network security.

    China Telecom Shanghai engaged Huawei to develop an access network slicing solution to address issues including insufficient equipment room space and runaway power consumption associated with rapid user base growth.

    “Traditional OLTs do not support the access of full services. Network slicing enables service isolation and optimizes resource utilization,” China Telecom Shanghai vice chief engineer Zhang Jun said.

    “Network slicing is our first step toward cloud. It is now being including in the related technical standards of China Telecom. In the future, we will cooperate with Huawei to further optimize network slicing.”

    The companies expect that network slicing will propel the development of gigabit networks. This will be essential to helping operators meet the enormous capacity demands of the cloud era.

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  • Alibaba Cloud to open new data centers

    Alibaba Cloud to open new data centers

    Alibaba Cloud has announced plans to open four new data centers by the end of 2016 in the Middle East, Europe, Australia and Japan.

    The new centers are expected to boost its data center network to 14 locations, covering key economic centers around the world. The data center in the Middle East, located in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, commenced initial operations today.

    Alibaba Cloud’s expansion aims to provide customers in Asia and worldwide with improved latency and greater access to diverse offerings, including data storage and analytics services, enterprise-level middleware, and cloud security services. The new data centers are expected to support Alibaba Cloud’s growing client base beyond the current 2.3 million.

    Extending its global footprint in the Asia-Pacific, Alibaba Cloud will open a new data center in Sydney, Australia by the end of 2016.

    Alibaba Cloud will bring its most popular cloud services in data storage and processing services, enterprise-level middleware, and cloud security services to the Australian market. A dedicated team will be based in Australia, and build up a cloud ecosystem with local technology partners to drive cloud and big-data business in the region.

    The planned new Japan Data Center, hosted by SB Cloud Corporation, a joint venture between Softbank and Alibaba Group, will meanwhile provide Japanese enterprises with public cloud computing services from Alibaba Cloud.

    With the joint venture, Alibaba Cloud will further expand its cloud computing service platform by leveraging SoftBank’s extensive enterprise customer base in Japan.

    “Alibaba Cloud has contributed significantly to China’s technology advancement, establishing critical commerce infrastructure to enable cross-border businesses, online marketplaces, payments, logistics, cloud computing and big data to work together seamlessly,” Alibaba Cloud president Simon Hu said.

    “We want to establish cloud computing as the digital foundation for the new global economy using the opportunities of cloud computing to empower businesses of all sizes across all markets.”

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  • Huawei launches cloud VPN integration service

    Huawei launches cloud VPN integration service

    Huawei has launched a new service which it says can resolve problems in enterprise leased line services that have affected telecoms operators, such as slow provisioning, lack of services, and difficult operation.

    According to Huawei, the CloudVPN Integration Service Solution can quickly meet the customized ICT needs of enterprise and enable operators to boost enterprise revenue by delivering a variety of value-added services.

    “A lot of operators are starting to think how to carry out CloudVPN business to market for their customers. But when they started this journey, they faced a lot of challenge,” said Bruce Xun, vice president of Global Technical Services Department at Huawei.

    By integrating a variety of value-added services, combining cloud, leased line, and value-added services, operators can provide one-stop CloudVPN for their enterprise customers, Xun noted.

    The CloudVPN Integration Service provides accurate network planning, helping carriers reduce time to market for new services over the overlay network architecture. Multi-vendor ICT resource orchestration allows enterprises to use cloud and network resources on demand and in real time, shortening the services provisioning time to minutes.

    Operators can reduce service delivery time from a month to 15 minutes with the CloudVPN Integration Service solution.

    The solution can meanwhile accurately identify the network bandwidth bottlenecks based on enterprise service prospects, optimizing networks accordingly to ensure services quality.

    At the launch, Huawei also announced it completed integration and certification with 20 ecosystem partners, including Fortinet, Check Point, Citrix, Red Hat, Riverbed and Infoblox, via its Cloud Open Labs. The company aims to expand the number of partners to 30 by the end of the year.

    Xun said Huawei’s Cloud Open Labs gives operators access to a range of third-party value-added services that have been pre-integrated by its partners.

    The agile integration capability of the CloudVPN Integration Service solution allows operators to add new VAS in just seven days.

    Huawei is planning to enhance its multi-vendor integration tool by increasing the development and testing team with 60 more senior engineers to support multi-level multi-vendor integration tool development.

    The service is expected to be commercially available by the end of the year.

  • Fujitsu develops technology to boost virtual networks

    Fujitsu develops technology to boost virtual networks

    Fujitsu Laboratories has developed automatic analysis technology to boost communications performance and quality in virtual networks.

    With the spread of virtualization technologies, such as the cloud, software defined networking (SDN), and network functions virtualization (NFV), there is demand for the ability to flexibly set up and operate high performance virtual infrastructure.

    In order to set up and operate virtual infrastructure for operations that require high performance, it is necessary for experts with knowledge of both hardware and software to take time to analyze bottlenecks and set up the virtual infrastructure appropriately. This results in high operating costs with frequent changes to the system structure or usage situation.

    To address this issue, Fujitsu Laboratories has developed a technology that, with a low load, captures communications packets passing through virtual infrastructures. The system uses this information to identify communication bottlenecks and automatically recommend configurations to improve communications speed and to reduce packet loss and other measures to raise virtual network quality.

    These technologies have been confirmed to roughly double communication speeds of virtual networks.

    Fujitsu said that with this technology, high communication performance and quality can be maintained, even in environments where the system structure and usage situation frequently change, such as virtual infrastructure for the cloud or telecommunications carriers.

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  • Reliance Group launches dedicated IoT venture

    Reliance Group launches dedicated IoT venture

    Indian conglomerate Reliance Group, parent company of Reliance Communications (RCom), has teamed up with Cisco Jasper to launch a new dedicated IoT venture in the market.

    The new venture, UNLIMIT, will provide enterprise customers throughout India with a service that combines the RCom mobile network with Cisco Jasper’s IoT connectivity management platform.

    As part of the partnership, Cisco will also improve its IoT engineering talent base in India by hiring more expert staff for its Cisco Innovation Center in Bangalore.

    Indian customers seeking to expand their IoT services to new overseas markets will be able to take advantage of Cisco Jasper’s partnerships with operator groups representing more than 120 mobile networks worldwide.

    The new service is also expected to play a key role in supporting the government’s Digital India project, which aims to transform 100 cities across the nation into smart cities.

    “IoT is a critical enabler for India’s growth, and businesses throughout the country are already utilizing its huge potential to help deliver innovative new services to their customers, while reducing cost and increasing revenue,” commented Juergen Hase, CEO of Reliance Group’s Unlimit IoT business group.

    “We are delighted to partner with Cisco Jasper, and this strategic partnership will strengthen the market position of UNLIMIT significantly.”

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  • India smartphone sales reach 32.3m in Q3

    India smartphone sales reach 32.3m in Q3

    India’s smartphone market crossed the 30 million unit shipments milestone for the first time in the third quarter, research firm IDC said.

    IDC’s Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker shows that the 32.3 million units sold during the quarter represent 17.5% growth over the previous quarter.

    Karthik J, Senior Market Analyst, Client Devices, IDC India, attributes the growth to the channel preparation for the festive season, mega online sales and early import of smartphones owing to Chinese holidays in October.

    Online smartphone shipments increased to 31.6% with impressive 35% Quarter-on-Quarter (QoQ) growth due to a strong performance by key online players primarily from China-based vendors.

    IDC noted that the Lenovo Group, which accounts for almost one-fourth of total online smartphone shipments, continues to lead online channel followed by Xiaomi.

    Karthik said Lenovo’ sales were primarily driven by its K5 series and Motorola’s G4 series models. Meanwhile, Xiaomi’s Redmi Note 3 and newly launched Redmi 3S also fuelled the online shipments to a large extent.

    In addition, 4G smartphone shipments grew 24.8% over the previous quarter. IDC noted that 7 out of 10 smartphones shipped in Q3 were 4G enabled and 9 out of 10 smartphones sold by online retailers were 4G.

    Overall, despite the recall of Samsung’s flagship Note 7, the Korean handset manufacturer leads the Indian smartphone market with a 23% share, recording 8% sequential growth and 9.7% growth from the same period last year.

    The Lenovo Group (including Motorola) climbed to second place with 9.6% share of smartphones. Motorola’s volume almost doubled Quarter-on-Quarter driven by newly launched E3 Power and G4 models. K5 series continues to be lead runner for Lenovo accounting for over 40% of its total volume.

    Meanwhile, Xiaomi makes its debut in top 5 as its shipments doubled over the previous quarter. With the primary focus on online and minimalistic product portfolio, the company has grown more than 2.5 times over the same period last year.

    IDC expects 2016 to end with a higher single-digit annual growth, considering the smartphone performance in Q3.

    “The entry of the new vendors have extended the feature phone supply since past few quarters. However, with expected entry of Jio in the feature phone market, a category is expected to grow significantly. This, in turn, might further slow down the feature phone to smartphone migration,” commented Navkendar Singh, senior research manager, IDC India.

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  • Singtel expands ReadyRoam to 26 countries

    Singtel expands ReadyRoam to 26 countries

    Singtel has expanded its ReadyRoam mobile data roaming service to cover multi-destination roaming across 26 countries in Asia, Europe and North America.

    The ReadyRoam 1GB for 30 days service will allow customers to use the same pool of data while traveling between any of the supported countries.

    The base service supports roaming between 11 Asian markets – China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Macau, New Zealand, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand – for S$20 ($14).

    For customers traveling further afield, ReadyRoam USA and Europe supports roaming to the above countries, as well as Canada, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the USA.

    Excess usage will be charged at S$0.019 per MB or S$0.034 per MB depending on a customer’s plan.

    “It’s the holiday season and many of our customers and their families will be traveling,” Singtel VP of mobile marketing consumer Singapore Diana Chen said.

    “Our enhanced ReadyRoam 1GB for 30 days will allow them the convenience of remaining contactable via their Singtel SIM card number while roaming seamlessly across multiple destinations.”

  • India to become handset component hub

    India to become handset component hub

    India is on track to manufacture $80 billion worth of mobile phone components over the next five years, new research suggests.

    This will help India become a global manufacturing hub, the study conducted by IIM Bangalore and market research firm Counterpoint Research has revealed.

    This presents a significant opportunity from the domestic demand perspective to manufacture mobile phones in the country and source local components, driving the government’s Make in India initiative and reduce dependency on imports.

    “India can potentially be the world leader in mobile phone manufacturing ecosystem and this has to be done in a phased manner,” said Aruna Sundararajan, secretary, ministry of electronics and IT, government of India, at an event here where the study findings were released.

    India has beaten the US to become the second largest global smartphone market in terms of users in early 2016 and is on track to cross half a billion smartphone users mark within the next five years.

    The contribution of domestically manufactured mobile phones has increased from 14% in 2014 to 67% in 2016 and is further estimated to reach 96% by 2020. However, 67% of the handsets manufactured in India contribute to just six per cent of the true local value addition with most of the OEMs still importing Semi Knocked Down components (SKDs).

    “Out of 50 facilities from original equipment manufacturers to original design manufacturers and electronics manufacturing services to component suppliers involved in manufacturing of mobile phones in India, almost three-fourth are Indian manufacturers, followed by Taiwanese with 10% and Chinese with 10 %,” the study revealed.

    “Under the proposed plan, we estimate that more than $15 billion worth components will be sourced locally over the period of five years through 2020 creating over a million direct and indirect jobs in India.”