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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.

  • Feature phones remain popular in Vietnam

    Feature phones remain popular in Vietnam

    Feature phones still account for nearly four out of every 10 mobile phones sold in Vietnam. Around 1.7 million phones were sold in September, of which over 600,000, or 37 percent, were feature phones, according to market research institute GfK.

    While there have been predictions that feature phones will lose popularity with the advent of cheap smartphones, their sales remain steady at 620,000-700,000 a month, the institute said.

    In terms of market share, feature phones even saw a slight increase from 34 percent in July to 36 percent in August.

    Nokia remains the leading brand in this segment with a market share of 55-57 percent in recent months, with the Finnish brand accounting for over half of the 20 top selling feature phones in September.

    The second most popular feature phone was local brand Masstel with a market share of 14-15 percent. Other brands sold include Itel, Mobell, Fmobile and Coolpad each with a market share of below 10 percent.

    Nguyen Duy, an employee at a mobile phone supermarket in Hanoi’s Gia Lam District, said: “The main buyers [of feature phones] are usually ordinary workers, students, older people, and businesses buying phones for internal communication needs.”

    “A significant portion of them are first-time users who want a device that could make and receive phone calls so they could keep in touch, especially one that’s easy to use.”

    Besides, many people buy Nokia’s new products such as the 3310, 230 and 105 to use as backup for their smartphones, he said.

    Nguyen Tuan Anh, an experienced mobile phone seller, is confident that feature phones would perform well for at least a few more years.

    Since their customers often prioritize low price over brand, phones from China and nameless brands would continue to sell well if they meet buyers’ needs, he said.

    But revenues from feature phone sales remain low. According to GfK, 70 percent of them cost below VND500,000 ($21.5).

    The best-selling device in this segment is the Nokia 105 with a price tag of VND350,000 ($15). Itel, the third largest brand, has products costing below VND200,000 ($8.6) such as Value 100 and IT2161.

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  • Nokia is trying to recover from a really bad decision it made about 5G chipsets

    Nokia is trying to recover from a really bad decision it made about 5G chipsets

    Last year when Nokia started planning its 5G networking equipment, it made a decision that came back to bite the company in the, uh, chipset. For Nokia’s line of “ReefShark” chips, used for its 5G radio, baseband and massive MIMO antennas, it decided to go with field-programmable gate array (FPGA) silicon. This type of chip can be programmed by the customer, thus giving Nokia an advantage in getting its 5G gear into the marketplace before the competition. But Nokia CEO Rajeev Suri had to admit that producing FPGA chips cost Nokia more money which reduced its profit margin for the component. As reported by FierceWireless, after reporting its Q3 numbers last week, Nokia lowered its full-year guidance

    Nokia wants to resume production of custom chipsets for its 5G products and to this end, it has hired 350 new employees in Finland to help it develop custom chips. Such development can take two years to complete. Nokia’s global head of Mobile Networks Marketing, Sandro Tavares, said that the company has been working on these SoCs for some time and has started shipping products with the SoCs replacing the FPGAs.

    Tavaras notes that the reasons that Nokia chose the programmable chip is because it can “put together the efficiency characteristics of an SoC but with the flexibility of being able to program via firmware. But it has the flip side of cost and power consumption. FPGAs do cost more in unit price, and they do use more power.” Additionally, Nokia at the time was working to integrate Alcatel Lucent and using FPGA, as previously noted, seemed like the best way to get to market quickly. Tavaras also points out that one supplier let them down. Nokia CEO Suri said that the company is not only designing its own custom SoCs, it also is working with a number of chipmakers including Intel. But the executive says that all of these actions won’t lower Nokia’s cost of building its 5G products until 2021.

    One analyst says that Nokia’s problems run deeper than just having to migrate from FPGA. Stefan Pongratz, senior director at Dell’Oro Group, says that 5G build-out is happening faster than expected and that competition is fierce. Pongratz says that “Nokia also has to deal with the consolidation of multiple platforms following the Alcatel Lucent merger.”

    Nokia has contracts with all four major U.S. carriers to deliver 5G networking equipment and the company was said to be responsible for Sprint’s delay in rolling out 5G service to four cities back in August. But this has been typical of the reputation that Nokia has when it comes to 5G. The company has been accused of lacking steady leadership and during a four-year period, it had three different people running the mobile networks division. That unit is now run by Tommi Uitto who earns nothing but praise from CEO Suri. “Tommi and his team have developed a comprehensive plan to ensure Nokia is competitive in 5G, and they are relentlessly executing against that plan,” Suri says. “Tommi is a strong leader, and he has my full support.” As for the 350 new employees being hired, Suri states, “We are repositioning our workforce to work on topics that are more critical for 5G development. We are hiring people in Finland and in other parts of the world and moving people from different programs to our 5G radio products.”

    Earlier this month, there was talk that the Trump administration had considered offering huge lines of credits to Nokia and its rival Ericsson. This would be done to help the two compete with the global leader in networking equipment, Huawei. The latter is considered a national security threat in the states and with funding from state-run Chinese banks, Huawei can offer generous financing terms to customers. Trump officials hoped to counter this advantage by arranging financing for Nokia and Ericsson, but outside of the initial rumors, there has been no word on whether the U.S. is still considering this option.

  • VinSmart to launch 5G smartphones next year

    VinSmart to launch 5G smartphones next year

    Smartphone maker VinSmart says it will launch its first 5G smartphone next July, and use its own 5G stations and equipment.

    “We have built a lab for researching and developing 5G smartphones and other 5G telecom equipment,” Ngo Hoang Anh, head of the company’s embedded software department, said at a forum Wednesday.

    The company is also partnering with U.S. tech giants Cisco and Intel to develop the 5G technology, Anh said. In June, VinSmart signed partnerships with Japan’s Fujitsu and the U.S.’s Qualcomm to develop its 5G smartphones.

    VinSmart has requested the Ministry of Information and Communications for bandwidth to test its 5G stations next August, he added.

    Tech expert Pham Hong Phuoc said that VinSmart developing 5G services is a rational move, as the local market is set to see more 5G smartphones this year and the next, and Vietnam aims to commercialize 5G next year.

    VinSmart’s announcement follows similar moves by telecom giant Viettel, which begun testing 5G broadcasting in September, and its competitor VNPT, which has announced plans to do so.

    No 5G smartphone has been manufactured or officially distributed in Vietnam so far, instead, they are hand-carried on overseas flights.

    Minister of Information and Communications Nguyen Manh Hung said last year that Vietnam should be one of the first countries in the world to launch 5G.

    5G is said to offer speeds 100 times faster than 4G, primarily used for smartphones and other similar devices. 5G is also expected to support new applications like remote medical procedures and autonomous driving.

  • Viettel Global posts $67 mln profit

    Viettel Global posts $67 mln profit

    Viettel Global has posted pre-tax profits of VND1.55 trillion ($67.1 million) this year, after seeing losses in Jan-Sept last year.

    The turnaround has happened thanks to strong revenues in Southeast Asia. Half of the telecom giant’s VND12.4 trillion ($537.3 million) revenue in the first nine months came from Southeast Asia, which went up 24 percent year on year, followed by Africa and Latin America, according to the company’s Q3 financial report.

    Its Metfone network in Cambodia saw after-tax profits go up 91 percent to VND672 billion ($29.1 million), while that of its Natcom network in Haiti rose 28 percent to VND261 billion ($11.3 million).

    The company’s VGI stock, listed on Vietnam’s Unlisted Public Companies Market (UPCoM), had risen 140 percent to VND32,400 ($1.4) from the beginning of the year as of Thursday, marking a market cap of over VND98.6 trillion ($4.27 billion).

    Viettel Global was established in 2006 to spread military-run Viettel Group’s presence in foreign markets. It currently operates in ten markets, namely Cambodia, Laos, Timor Leste, Mozambique, Burundi, Haiti, Peru, Cameroon, Tanzania and Myanmar.

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  • The Snapdragon 735 chipset could lead to lower prices for 5G phones

    The Snapdragon 735 chipset could lead to lower prices for 5G phones

    Everyone is awaiting Qualcomm’s introduction of its next-generation flagship SoC, the Snapdragon 865 Mobile Platform. This could take place sometime next month. Meanwhile, you might recall that six months ago the chipmaker unveiled the Snapdragon 730 chipset and the Snapdragon 730G gaming-focused chip.

    The Snapdragon 735, while designed by Qualcomm, will apparently be manufactured by Samsung using its 7nm EUV LPP (Low Power Plus) process. The lower the process number, the higher the number of transistors that can fit inside an integrated circuit. By adding transistors, chips become more powerful and energy-efficient. By next year, both Samsung and rival TSMC should be rolling 5nm chips off of its assembly line (more on this later). The EUV stands for extreme-ultraviolet lithography, a technology that allows chip dies to be more precisely marked up for transistor placement; this will also allow more transistors to fit inside a chip. When you consider that Huawei’s Kirin 990 SoC with an embedded 5G modem contains about 10.3 billion transistors, you can understand how precise chip production must be.

    The Snapdragon 735 SoC is rumored to feature eight cores with a pair of Cortex-A76 cores to do the heavy lifting; the remaining six Cortex-A55 cores will be earmarked for general housekeeping. The latter will reportedly run at a clock speed of 1.73GHz, and the two high-performance cores at 2.26GHz and 2.32GHz. If the rumored specs are legit, the chipset will come with the Adreno 620 GPU and support up to 12GB of RAM and 4K video at 60fps. And there is good news for consumers; the Snapdragon 735 SoC is said to be 5G ready, which means that support for the next generation of wireless will be available on more mid-range (and less expensive) phones.

    It should be noted that Qualcomm has yet to introduce the component. The Snapdragon 735 SoC will replace the 730 which is produced using the 8nm process and ships with the Adreno 618 graphics processor. Some features of the current chip, such as support for the new Wi-Fi 6 standard and the multi-core Qualcomm AI Engine, will undoubtedly be found in the Snapdragon 735 chipset. Qualcomm said earlier this year that it would bring 5G support to its mid-range series 7xx and series 6xx Snapdragon chipsets.

    As for the eagerly awaited Snapdragon 865 Mobile Platform, the other day Chinese luxury goods manufacturer, 8848 was the first to announce a phone that will be powered by Qualcomm’s new flagship chipset. The Titanium M6 5G will ship next year with the Snapdragon 865 SoC inside. While Qualcomm could introduce the chip next month, it won’t be found inside any consumer devices until next year.

    What we know about the Snapdragon 865 is that Samsung’s foundry unit will manufacture it using Samsung’s 7nm EUV process. The Snapdragon 855 and the overclocked Snapdragon 855+ chipsets were both produced by the world’s largest independent foundry, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) using TSMC’s 7nm process. 2021’s Snapdragon 875 Mobile Platform will be produced by TSMC using its new 5nm process. At 5nm, integrated circuits are packed with as many as 171.3 million transistors per square millimeter.

    Both Samsung and TSMC have roadmaps taking production to 3nm. The latter is reportedly working on ways to keep increasing the number of transistors inside a chip to increase both power and energy consumption. Just to show you how far we’ve come, the Apple iPhone 4, released in 2010, featured Apple’s A4 SoC under the hood. That chip was designed by Apple, equipped with ARM’s Cortex-A8 CPU, and built by Samsung using its 45nm process.

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  • Mavenir extends alliance with Vodafone Idea to fortify presence in India

    Mavenir extends alliance with Vodafone Idea to fortify presence in India

    This partnership will focus on three thrust areas. First, building a universal secured Cloud capable of hosting multiple tenants and third-party applications. Second, building a fully automated platform that enables self-provisioning of various workloads. Third and most importantly, setting up a joint innovation lab and a team that will consistently innovate on Chipset, Operating System, and work at the Application level to offer unique APIs and enables new use cases and delightful experience to VIL customers.

    “Vodafone Idea has the largest Edge Cloud deployment in India. Our partnership with Mavenir will enable continued innovation in optimizing data path algorithms for VOLTE. We look forward to setting up a joint lab and an agile team that will enable onboarding third-party applications on our distributed cloud”, said Vishant Vora, CTO, Vodafone Idea Limited whose team is spearheading this initiative.

    The partnership has led to the contextualization of software algorithms, leading to unprecedented efficiencies. VIL and Mavenir partnership has been extended to include collaboration with chipset manufacturers and Operating System providers. The stack being deployed is all open sourced and benefits from consistent innovation led by global open community.

    “Next frontier in our partnership will be to extend the platforms deployed to host new applications serving IOT and CDN use cases. We plan to build platforms that can host varied OS and varied workloads. We aim to automate deployment and assurance and thereby extend self-provisioning capability for VIL customers. We are excited to set up a joint lab and team, consistently innovate and work with VIL and its customers in an agile manner to turn around new solutions fast,” said Pardeep Kohli, President and CEO Mavenir.

    Mavenir has partnered with VIL in IMS-VOLTE deployments. In future, the partnership aims to extend the platform being deployed for IMS-VOLTE applications to host other Captive and third-party workloads. Mavenir will partner with VIL to extend its distributed Network cloud as secured platform to multiple retail, SME users and start-ups.

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  • Indonesia’s Telkomsel commercially launches CloudAIR 2.0 solution with Huawei

    Indonesia’s Telkomsel commercially launches CloudAIR 2.0 solution with Huawei

    From the verification in Telkomsel’s live network, the solution increases the mobile broadband cell edge user experience significantly. The application of spectrum cloudification technology increases the LTE user downlink speed throughput by 116% from 50Mbps to 108Mbps. In addition, the implementation of channel cloudification technology improves the carrier aggregation coverage for outdoor areas by 21.4% as well as two to three times user experience improvement for indoor areas.

    As the number of Telkomsel 4G subscribers grows rapidly, many of 2G subscribers will migrate to 4G. At the same time, there are many of 2G subscribers who will be remaining for a long time, making this an obvious long-tail phenomenon. Therefore, it is a big challenge for Telkomsel to maximize the spectrum efficiency in a limited spectrum by scheduling the 2G and 4G resources based on demand.

    Furthermore, in order to meet the rapid development of 4G business, Telkomsel has deployed LTE technology in 2300MHz, 2100Mhz, 1800MHz and 900MHz at the same time. However, the high-frequency band uplink signal becomes a coverage bottleneck due to a high propagation, a high penetration loss and a limited transmitting power of the terminal. This situation results in poor user experience at the cell edge, especially in indoor areas. Consequently, it is also challenging for Telkomsel to fully use the spectrum resources in high frequency.

    In response to those issues, Telkomsel and Huawei conducted Joint Innovation Center and introduced the CloudAIR 2.0 solution, which successfully solved the problems through two technologies: spectrum cloudification (dynamic spectrum sharing) and channel cloudification.

    The spectrum cloudification technology realizes the deployment of different Radio Access Technologies (RAT) in the same spectrum. This solution can dynamically allocate and adjust spectrum resources according to the changes of traffic and avoid the legacy RAT to occupy the golden spectrum in the long term to maximize the spectrum efficiency.

    Meanwhile, the channel cloudification technology combines the advantage of larger downlink bandwidth of high band and better uplink coverage of low band. The high band is selected as the uplink at near point and midpoint for capacity, while the low band is selected as the uplink at cell edge to compensate the coverage limitation of high band. The coordination between LTE high band and low band channel cloudification can significantly improve the coverage of high band and improve the cell edge user experience, especially for LTE indoor coverage areas.

    Director of Planning and Transformation of Telkomsel Edward Ying said, “We have been committed to the technology innovation and build the mobile broadband network to provide ultimate user experience to our subscribers. The CloudAIR 2.0 solution has enabled us to achieve a convergence of the multi-band network that maximizes capacity and coverage requirements and enhances the user experience effectively. We will continue to carry out joint innovation projects with Huawei, hoping JIC3.0 to achieve greater success.”

    Dr. Peter Zhou, Chief Marketing Officer of Huawei Wireless Solution said, “We are very delighted to provide an innovative solution for Telkomsel, the largest mobile network operator in Indonesia. Our focus is on improving the efficiency of air interface, enabling Telkomsel to deploy services more flexibly and, of course, enhancing the experience of Telkomsel’s millions subscribers.”

  • Docomo to launch 5G soon

    Docomo to launch 5G soon

    The first phase will include building a non-standalone 5G system based on trials that have already started in 2017, she said, adding that spectrum will be allocated by end of March 2019. Docomo is striving to commercialize 5G services in 2020, just in time for the Summer Olympics in Tokyo.

    “Since the standardization is set, it’s time to consider how to deploy a 5G network. We need to strategically deploy 5G in the necessary areas, with the necessary functions, and with adequate frequencies,” Lan Chen said.

    According to her, the first element of a successfully built 5G network is its ability to adapt to the continuous growth in data traffic and handle new business cases across various industries.

    Docomo started to shift from being a global communications company into a value co-creation company by partnering with key actors in the vertical market. The main driver of this transformation was the daunting challenges mobile operators face across the world, in addition, to need to get ready for 5G.

    In February, the company launched its 5G Open Partners Programme, with more than 1,400 companies already joining the initiative. “Our aim is to use 5G technology to enhance the user experience and use AI technology to expand the market,” Docomo president and CEO said.

  • Australia gets first 5G-enabled Wi-Fi hotspots

    Australia gets first 5G-enabled Wi-Fi hotspots

    “We have said we intend to lead on 5G and with these 5G-enabled Wi-Fi hotspots Australian consumers will be among the first people in the world to try the technology,” Mr. Wright said. “Taking 5G technology out of a lab and into the hands of consumers is another key milestone on Telstra’s roadmap to offering 5G services in 2019.”

    There are no 5G compatible commercial smartphones or tablets available today. By connecting 5G backhaul and infrastructure in the Southport Exchange, to a standard Wi-Fi access point then people can use the technology on their existing device, Telstra explained in a press release.

    Using Wi-Fi access as part of Telstra’s 5G technical program is a way to show the benefits of 5G capability in real-world conditions. The 5G hotspots will be open to anyone in the area and are free with a download limit of 10 GB per day per device.

    “Wi-Fi has limited throughput so a single hotspot alone cannot come close to reaching the limits of 5G at our Innovation Centre. By using multiple hotspots with potentially hundreds of smartphone users served through a single 5G device we are able to get closer to demonstrating 5G in a real-world environment,” Wright said. “Our 5G backhaul is capable of delivering download speeds of more than 3Gbps, which is capable of supporting around 1,000 HD movies being streamed simultaneously.”

    Telstra is also using mmWave spectrum and its 5G Innovation Centre to put a connected car on the road with the Intel 5G Automotive Trial Platform, one of the most advanced 5G prototype devices available in the world today.

    “Working with global technology companies Ericsson and Intel, we have put Australia’s first 5G connected car on the road. We are in the very early stages of development and are achieving download speeds approaching 1Gbps inside the car and the vehicle is also equipped with a Wi-Fi access point,” Wright said.

    “This shows how quickly technology is evolving. At the beginning of the year, our 5G prototype device was the size of a bar fridge and weighed more than 200 kilograms.  Now, in collaboration with Intel and Ericsson, we have one that has been shrunk down to the size of a personal computer and can be installed in a car.”

    The Connected Car will help Telstra to start getting real results on mobile performance over mmWave and ensure 5G network readiness.  These advances are part of a series of 5G related activities that Telstra, Ericsson, Intel and other technology companies will undertake on the Gold Coast in 2018.

    The 5G Innovation Centre is central to a $60 million investment Telstra has made to upgrade infrastructure on the Gold Coast to support growing demand and major events in the area.

    Actual broadband speeds experienced on the 5G enabled Wi-Fi hotspots and Connected Car will vary and are likely to be lower than the maximum depending on factors, Telstra said, such as the type of device being used, distance from the hotspot and the number of people connected to the hotspot at the one time. 

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  • Vodafone NZ unveils agile and programmable network

    Vodafone NZ unveils agile and programmable network

    With an adaptive network, Vodafone can better support a growing enterprise customer base that requires high-capacity connectivity as business applications and workloads increasingly move to public cloud services (SaaS/IaaS) and cloud data centers both locally and internationally.

    Vodafone Technology Director Tony Baird says this deployment builds on a long-standing relationship. “Our long-standing collaboration with Ciena is a relationship we value greatly. The combination of top-echelon technology and impeccable customer service has put us in a winning position. As a result, we’re very comfortable in not only maintaining but growing our customer base, particularly those that require complex and unique network services.”

    Vodafone can also set customer-defined service policies and program its network to suggest the ideal capacity, hardware configuration and spectral placement for any channel, across any network path.

    Additionally, with Ciena’s Liquid Restoration capability, the operator can significantly improve service availability with flexible adjustment of deployed coherent optical capacity and route affected services across any available path in the network.

    “To respond to changes in end-user consumption and explosion in data usage, leading operators like Vodafone New Zealand must both automate and scale their networks,” said Rick Seeto, Vice President and General Manager, Ciena Asia Pacific & Japan. “They need a network that can adapt and respond, in real-time, to their customers’ ever-changing demands while transforming from a necessary capability to a strategic asset – that’s the basis of the adaptive network.”

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  • Airtel and Telecom Egypt partner on global submarine cable systems

    The partnership grants Airtel the right to use fiber pairs of MENA Cable from Egypt to India with access to Saudi Arabia and Oman, and other fiber pairs from Egypt towards Italy. It also extends beyond MENA Cable, where Airtel will get the right to use a fiber pair from Egypt to France on TE North along with capacities on SMW5 and AAE1 cable systems.

    With this, Airtel will be able to further diversify its global network to serve the massive growth in demand for data services, particularly in emerging markets across South Asia, Africa and Middle East, while also benefitting from the favorable economics of Telecom Egypt’s existing wide cable systems network.

    Commenting on the partnership, Ajay Chitkara, Director and CEO, Airtel Business, said, “The partnership with Telecom Egypt underlines our commitment to provide world-class service experience to our customers. The partnership including MENA Cable and TE’s network will be a good addition to our global network portfolio and will provide us with a high quality and diversified new route to Western Europe and the rest of the world. With the explosion of data usage in emerging markets, including India and Africa, this asset will provide us a scalable and diverse high capacity highway to serve our customers. In particular, it will provide impetus to India’s emergence as a major regional internet hub serving customers across SAARC region, with seamless global connectivity.”

    Ahmed El Beheiry, Chief Executive Officer of Telecom Egypt, added: “Telecom Egypt’s global network was built over the years through investments in consortiums as well as private international submarine cable systems. Our reach and position as an international hub with tens of Tbps lit capacity, makes us the partner of choice for Euro-Asian and Euro-African transit traffic. Telecom Egypt signed the agreement with OTMT to acquire MENA Cable with the aim of capitalizing on the growing traffic from India and Saudi Arabia to Europe and to obtain a new gateway to Europe through Italy. We are pleased to be able to sign the MoU with Airtel as well as to be able to bundle MENA’s assets with existing assets of the TE network. We aim to come back to the market with more details on the MoU and its financial impact once the deal is closed.”

    Egypt’s distinctive geographic location on the Red and Mediterranean seas has enabled Telecom Egypt to connect more than 11 cable systems from the East and 13 from the West linked with the Red-Med Corridor consisting of 7 diversified routes across Egypt. Telecom Egypt’s global network was built over the years through investments in international submarine cable systems, namely: TE North, ALETAR, SEA-ME-WE-3, SEA-ME-WE-4, SEA-ME-WE-5, IMEWE, EIG, and AAE-1.

    Airtel’s global network portfolio includes ownership of i2i submarine cable system connecting Chennai to Singapore, consortium ownership of SMW4 submarine cable system connecting Chennai and Mumbai to Singapore and Europe, and new cable system investments like Asia America Gateway (AAG), India Middle East & Western Europe (IMEWE), Unity, EIG (Europe India Gateway) and East Africa Submarine System (EASSy). It also has terrestrial express connectivity to neighboring countries including Nepal, Pakistan, Bhutan, Bangladesh and China.

  • Vietnamese operators to begin 5G testing as of 2019

    Vietnamese operators to begin 5G testing as of 2019

    Starting from the capital, Hanoi, the country aims to upgrade its mobile network along with the southern commercial hub of Ho Chi Minh City.

    “Vietnam should be among the first nations to launch 5G services in order to move up in global telecom rankings,” said Nguyen Manh Hung, the country’s minister of Information and Communications.

    Hung, previously the chairman and general director of Viettel Group, wants to reacquire Vietnam’s rank among the top countries worldwide in terms of major exporter of 5G gear through boosting the development of local equipment. He also plans to make the licensing and approval process easier for Vietnam’s IT sector.

    Several partnerships have been made in order to facilitate the procedures: VNPT has teamed up with Nokia on 5G, while MobiFone signed an agreement with Samsung Electronics to cooperate on 4G and 5G networks earlier this year.

    In 2017, Ericsson held the first 5G demonstration in the country in partnership with the Vietnam Authority of Radio Frequency Management.

    While MobiFone and VNPT are on the list of state-owned companies slated for privatization by 2020, Viettel is to remain in government hands.

  • Bharti Airtel meets growing data consumption with new independent fiber company

    Bharti Airtel meets growing data consumption with new independent fiber company

    The owner of the telecom company, Sunil Bharti Mittal, announced the appointment of Savargaonkar and acknowledged his new role. Savargaonkar was previously the company’s director of networks, equivalent to chief technology officer, and today, he will continue to report to Gopal Vittal, Bharti Airtel’s CEO.

    “Given the significant growth in data consumption in recent years, we believe a robust and independent infrastructure company that serves the growing need of fiber in the telecom industry is critical,” Vittal announced.

    Bharti Airtel is about to transfer its fiber optic cable network to a wholly-owned subsidiary, Telesonic Networks Ltd, through low sales. The company manages 246,000 km of fiber optics, which is aggressively rising to meet increasing data growth. “Fiber assets from Telesonic may eventually be transferred to this new subsidiary,” a source commented.

    Not surprisingly, Nitin Soni, director, Asian corporates, at Fitch Ratings, found that it was of common sense to have an independent company that owns fiber since Airtel had previously formed a telecom tower joint venture – Indus Towers – with Vodafone India and Idea Cellular.

    “There is no point of duplication on capex spending like tower infrastructure. India is one of those countries where price competitiveness is so high that most telcos are taking the rational decision to make independent companies,” he said.

    But in order to become a true independent company, Airtel would have to well play its cards and sell a majority stake. This way, it will attract other players to use the assets, not so far of what it’s doing with its tower business, Soni said.

    “If you keep having stake, it won’t be regarded as truly independent by competitors like Reliance Jio, and would continue to build its own fiber. Unless assets are leased by Jio, these independent companies can’t grow,” he added.

    Airtel also appointed Randeep Singh Sekhon as the new chief of technology for its India and South Asia operations, replacing Savargaonkar. Sekhon, who will also report to Vittal, has a previous experience in various senior leadership roles with telcos in Malaysia and Indonesia being earlier CEO of Hutchison 3 Indonesia.

    These new appointments were announced following several events that happened in the company such as the exit of Airtel’s chief technology officer for mobile networks, Shyam Mardikar, who is widely speculated to be joining a rival telco and the departure of Airtel’s enterprise business head Ashok Ganapathy replaced by Ajay Chitkara, who now oversees both the domestic and global enterprise operations.

    Forming the new independent fiber company coincides with the preparation for another battle with Reliance Jio on the fiber optic network–the country’s wired broadband market. Airtel and Jio are having an intense price war in the wireless segment.

    It is expected that Jio will offer a mass-market wired-broadband product bundled with Internet-based television programming starting at about Rs 500 a month, almost half the current market rates for similar services.

    According to Soni, Airtel will benefit from the expansion of the market as Jio enters, but there will be pressure on the ARPUs which will decline by 30-50%. “In the short-term, Airtel will face revenue EBITDA declines in the home broadband segment and we are sure that in the medium term, they will benefit from the expansion of the market,” he added.

    According to analysts, Airtel should also consider the competitiveness of the combined Vodafone-Idea Cellular company, which will have a comparatively strong fiber business through the recently acquired YOU Broadband business.

    Homes in 89 cities pan-India benefit from Airtel’s fixed-line telephone and broadband (DSL) services. The number is set to reach to least 100 key cities from 89 now with Airtel planning to set aside a sizeable portion of its Rs 24,000 crore capital expenditure plan for FY19 to expand its broadband network. Another 10 million-plus homes will be covered by FY21, t

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  • Thailand’s AIS aims to educate people on importance of e-waste management through new campaign

    Thailand’s AIS aims to educate people on importance of e-waste management through new campaign

    The campaign encourages people to throw their electronic waste like old AC adaptors, old mobile phones, power banks, broken devices and others into e-waste bins which are equipped with IoT technology to collect and get rid of e-waste.

    The CEO of AIS, Somchai Lertsuitwong explained that the initiative is seeking to reduce carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to one million units and eradicate at least 100,000 pieces of e-waste by 2020.

    “AIS is heading towards its 30th year of operation and we take pride in being part of Thailand’s history. In the last three decades, especially in the continuous growth of the telecom industry contributing to a better quality of life among Thais nationwide,” Somchai said.

    He further added that “being No. 1 in the telecom industry is due to our dedication to the pursuit of creating innovative products and services for the benefit of society and the country.”

  • India has world’s cheapest mobile data rates

    India has world’s cheapest mobile data rates

    Cable.co.uk analyzed 6,313 mobile data plans from 230 different countries from October to November 2018.

    For India’s market, 57 mobile data plans were analyzed and found that the lowest rate per 1GB in the country was 1.41 Rupees ($0.02) while the highest was at 98.83 Rupees ($1.41).

    “A country whose young population has a particularly high technological awareness, India offers a vibrant smartphone market, with strong adoption and many competitors. Data, therefore, is quite staggeringly cheap,” the report mentioned.

    India is home to more than 430 million smartphone users and is the second-largest smartphone market in the world, with China being the first.

    Other countries with cheap mobile data packages include Kyrgyzstan at $0.27, Kazakhstan at $0.49, Ukraine at $0.51, and Rwanda at $0.56.

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