2016 is upon us, and as everyone looks ahead to see where the APAC telecoms sector is going, Telecom Asia looks to the past to see how the sector got here in the first place.
In our second annual Rewind feature, we wrap up 2015 with a look back at the telecoms news stories that dominated the headlines and captured our readers’ attention (i.e. generated serious pageviews) on telecomasia.net.
Among the big stories this year: Spectrum wars at WRC-15, standards wars for narrowband LTE, 5G defined, the rise of OTT video services, an M&A feeding frenzy (including one that hasn’t actually happened yet), Project Loon, and the strange and terrible saga of the [alleged] Great Firewall of Thailand.
See Also
Telecom Asia December 2015 / January 2016
The Great Firewall of Thailand
Thailand was a major hotbed of telecoms-related news as the military government continued implementing various telecoms reforms and conducted a marathon 4G spectrum auction.
But the story that really raised eyebrows was the reported plan by the government to create a single internet gateway in and out of the country that would be managed by state-owned CAT Telecom.
When the news broke in September, critics instantly blasted the move. Some described the single gateway plan as “the great firewall of Thailand” whose real purpose was to allegedly control the flow of information on the Internet. Others argued that routing the Internet through a single gateway controlled by one entity would result in slower internet speeds and a single point of failure. Yet others complained it heralded a return to the monopoly days when CAT Telecom ran the only commercial Internet gateway in the country.
After the news broke, various government and telecoms parties issued sometimes conflicting statements about whether the plan would go ahead, or ever existed in the first place.
Information and Communication Technology Minister Uttama Savanayana said the single gateway was just a proposal under review, and that the goal of implementing it would be to reduce costs for Thailand’s ISPs. Acting CAT CEO Colonel Sanpachai Huvanandana said CAT was pushing ahead with a rebranded single gateway as a cost-saving measure.
By mid-October, Deputy Prime Minister Somkid Jatusripitak said the plan had been scrapped, according to Reuters. But that didn’t stop the Anonymous hacking collective from declaring war on Thailand’s government - and in particular, CAT Telecom - over the idea a week later.
“The latest project of the Thai military government is to deploy a single gateway in order to control, intercept and arrest any persons not willing to follow the Junta orders and your so called morals,” said a statement from Anonymous.
Shortly afterwards, the websites of the Information and Communication Technology and finance ministries and CAT Telecom were among those targeted in a DDoS attack.
WRC is over (if you want it)
The hottest telecoms-related event of 2015 was WRC-15, in which companies representing the mobile, satellite and broadcast sectors lobbied the ITU hard for new spectrum allocations.
And in the end, everybody won. More or less.
The main battle was between the GSM Association and the satellite industry, who have already been scrapping over use of the extended C-band (3.4GHz-4.2GHz) for mobile broadband services.
For WRC-15, the GSM Association argued in official documents that the mobile sector will require another 600-800MHz worth of spectrum by 2020 to handle traffic demand over the next five to ten years, and asked the ITU to harmonize not only lower frequency bands (470-694/698MHz) and extended C-band (3.4GHz-4.2GHz) for mobile broadband use, but also other satellite bands, including the S-band (2.7-2.9GHz) and L band (between 1300MHz and 1518MHz).
The satellite sector accused the GSMA of taking more spectrum than it needed, claiming that in most markets, less than 50% of the spectrum already earmarked by the ITU for mobile broadband services has actually been licensed - and much of what spectrum has already been licensed isn’t being fully utilized.
In the end, the GSMA got three new globally harmonized bands: the 700 MHz band (694-790 MHz); the lower 200 MHz of the C-band (3.4-3.6 GHz) and L-band spectrum (1427-1518 MHz). What it didn’t get was harmonized spectrum for the sub-700 MHz band (especially 610-694/698 MHz) or the rest of the extended C-band (3.6-4.2 GHz).
The satellite sector was pleased about the latter, and wasn’t too concerned with the L-band allocations, as there are clear measures to protect the satellite users in the 1518-1559 MHz portion of the band. The satellite sector also scored a victory by keeping the harmonized frequencies for the C, Ku or Ka bands off the menu for WRC-19 as possible 5G spectrum candidates.
The GSMA was clearly disappointed with the decision to preserve the sub-700 MHz bands for terrestrial broadcasters in Region 1 (EMEA and central Asia) until at least 2023 (when the topic will be revisited at WRC-23). Chief regulatory officer John Giusti made it clear in public statements that the decision was a mistake, arguing that it was possible for broadcasters and mobile to co-exist in the UHF band, and anyway more people will watch video on mobile.
Meanwhile, everyone is already bracing themselves for WRC-19, which will be focused heavily on global and regional allocations for 5G technologies, particularly millimeter-wave bands above 24 GHz. As Caroline Gabriel noted in the Wireless Watch newsletter published by Rethink Research, the debate regarding millimeter-wave at WRC-19 won’t be just about harmonization and economic benefits: “There are many technical challenges to address too, particularly if these bands are to be used for access as well as backhaul - reducing shadow and loss, deciding on an air interface, working out how to integrate it into mass market devices and to aggregate it with lower bands.”
5G defined (sort of)
One of the hot tech topics of 2015 was 5G, even though few people in telecoms agreed on what it actually is. They know what it isn’t - it’s not a relatively straightforward network RAN upgrade that would supersede the previous generation, but rather an amalgam of technologies combining everything from legacy 3G, 4G and Wi-Fi to cloud, big data analytics and network virtualization, among others - all for the purpose of delivering ubiquitous, seamless broadband to any device (all 50 billion of them) by 2020. But with different vendors promoting differing visions of what they called “5G”, there’s still a lot of confusion over what counts as 5G and what doesn’t. And operators being operators, what they really needed in 2015 was a benchmark they could get their heads around - how fast is it?
The ITU gave them the answer in June 2015. During a meeting of the ITU-R Working Party in the US, the ITU defined the goals, processes and timeline for 5G development. They even gave it a name: IMT-2020. And according to various internet reports, the ITU defined 5G as networks capable of transmitting data at up to 20 Gbps.
However, that number didn’t actually come from the ITU - not publicly. The ITU statement and links to supporting documents make no mention of data speeds or other performance benchmarks. It merely outlined the next steps in establishing “detailed technical performance requirements for the radio systems to support 5G, taking into account the needs of a wide portfolio of future scenarios and use cases, and then to specify the evaluation criteria for assessment of candidate radio interface technologies to join the IMT-2020 family. These new systems, set to become available in 2020, will usher in new paradigms in connectivity in mobile broadband wireless systems to support, for example, extremely high definition video services, real time low latency applications and the expanding realm of the Internet of Things (IoT).”
The 20 Gbps number came from the Korea Times, which cited claims form South Korea’s Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning that IMT-2020 networks must support data speeds up to 20 Gbps, and have a capacity to provide over 100 Mbps data rates to over 1 million IoT devices within a square kilometer.
Sister publication FierceWireless Europe contacted ITU spokesman Sanjay Acharya for clarification. Acharya said: “As of now, I understand the peak data rate of IMT-2020 for enhanced Mobile Broadband is expected to reach 10 Gbps. However, under certain conditions and scenarios, IMT-2020 would support up to 20 Gbps peak data rate.”
So between 10 Gbps and 20 Gbps, then.
LTE officially goes narrowband
All eyes were on the 3GPP in September as it proposed a narrowband version of LTE for inclusion in Release 13 that will allow LTE networks to support IoT applications with very low data rate and power consumption requirements. The technology, billed as “Narrowband IoT LTE,” is expected to be finalized in early 2016 - along with other IoT-oriented low-rate, lower-cost versions of LTE like LTE Cat 1, Cat 0 and LTE MTC.
One reason the decision raised so much interest - apart from a general eagerness by cellcos to use their LTE assets (and associated frequency bands) to cash in on the IoT - was a last-minute standards war for Narrowband IoT LTE.
Actually a number of companies have been clashing over narrowband LTE technologies for some time. But the week before the 3GPP meeting, Nokia Networks, Ericsson and Intel announced they had teamed up to back Narrow-Band Long-Term Evolution (NB-LTE), a technology seen as a direct challenge to Huawei Technologies, who backed its own Narrowband Cellular IoT (NB-CIoT), which had already gained operator support from heavy-hitters like Vodafone and China Unicom.
The main difference between NB-LTE and NB-CIoT came down to how much of existing LTE networks can be repurposed for IoT. Critics of NB-CIoT’s approach claimed that it requires new chipsets and wasn’t backwards compatible with any LTE network older than Release 13.
NB-LTE, by contrast, “can be fully integrated into existing LTE networks, works within current LTE bands and does not need an overlay network,” according to Nokia. In other words, NB-LTE uses more of the existing ecosystem and thus promises better economies of scale.
It’s a moot point now, of course - Narrowband IoT LTE in its final form is expected to use specs from both technologies.
According to Chris Taylor, director of RF and wireless components at Strategy Analytics, Narrowband IoT LTE will have a significant advantage over proprietary air interfaces for low-power wide area networking (LPWAN) technologies for M2M and IoT like SIGFOX, LoRaWAN (Long Range WAN) and Ultra Narrow Band (UNB) because of the huge base of LTE networks that will support it. Potential apps include metering, environmental and industrial monitoring, object location tracking, e-health, wearables and sensors.
“Narrowband IoT LTE would compete with other LPWAN air interfaces, but could complement local area wireless mesh networks using ZigBee, Bluetooth Smart or Z-Wave for example,” Taylor wrote in a blog post.
But while Narrowband IoT LTE is scheduled to be frozen in early 2016, there’s still a chance it may not make Release 13, Taylor added.
“The only concern we have heard so far is that including Narrowband IoT LTE in 3GPP Rel. 13 could delay the 3GPP release. Eager chip suppliers note that LTE MTC is already well defined, and provides low cost, low power consumption and coverage gains compared to LTE Cat. 0 and above, so perhaps the cellular industry should move Narrowband IoT LTE to Rel. 14.”
WRC is over (if you want it)
The hottest telecoms-related event of 2015 was WRC-15, in which companies representing the mobile, satellite and broadcast sectors lobbied the ITU hard for new spectrum allocations.
And in the end, everybody won. More or less.
See Also
Telecom Asia December 2015 / January 2016
The main battle was between the GSM Association and the satellite industry, who have already been scrapping over use of the extended C-band (3.4GHz-4.2GHz) for mobile broadband services.
For WRC-15, the GSM Association argued in official documents that the mobile sector will require another 600-800MHz worth of spectrum by 2020 to handle traffic demand over the next five to ten years, and asked the ITU to harmonize not only lower frequency bands (470-694/698MHz) and extended C-band (3.4GHz-4.2GHz) for mobile broadband use, but also other satellite bands, including the S-band (2.7-2.9GHz) and L band (between 1300MHz and 1518MHz).
The satellite sector accused the GSMA of taking more spectrum than it needed, claiming that in most markets, less than 50% of the spectrum already earmarked by the ITU for mobile broadband services has actually been licensed - and much of what spectrum has already been licensed isn’t being fully utilized.
In the end, the GSMA got three new globally harmonized bands: the 700 MHz band (694-790 MHz); the lower 200 MHz of the C-band (3.4-3.6 GHz) and L-band spectrum (1427-1518 MHz). What it didn’t get was harmonized spectrum for the sub-700 MHz band (especially 610-694/698 MHz) or the rest of the extended C-band (3.6-4.2 GHz).
The satellite sector was pleased about the latter, and wasn’t too concerned with the L-band allocations, as there are clear measures to protect the satellite users in the 1518-1559 MHz portion of the band. The satellite sector also scored a victory by keeping the harmonized frequencies for the C, Ku or Ka bands off the menu for WRC-19 as possible 5G spectrum candidates.
The GSMA was clearly disappointed with the decision to preserve the sub-700 MHz bands for terrestrial broadcasters in Region 1 (EMEA and central Asia) until at least 2023 (when the topic will be revisited at WRC-23). Chief regulatory officer John Giusti made it clear in public statements that the decision was a mistake, arguing that it was possible for broadcasters and mobile to co-exist in the UHF band, and anyway more people will watch video on mobile.
Meanwhile, everyone is already bracing themselves for WRC-19, which will be focused heavily on global and regional allocations for 5G technologies, particularly millimeter-wave bands above 24 GHz. As Caroline Gabriel noted in the Wireless Watch newsletter published by Rethink Research, the debate regarding millimeter-wave at WRC-19 won’t be just about harmonization and economic benefits: “There are many technical challenges to address too, particularly if these bands are to be used for access as well as backhaul - reducing shadow and loss, deciding on an air interface, working out how to integrate it into mass market devices and to aggregate it with lower bands.”
5G defined (sort of)
One of the hot tech topics of 2015 was 5G, even though few people in telecoms agreed on what it actually is. They know what it isn’t - it’s not a relatively straightforward network RAN upgrade that would supersede the previous generation, but rather an amalgam of technologies combining everything from legacy 3G, 4G and Wi-Fi to cloud, big data analytics and network virtualization, among others - all for the purpose of delivering ubiquitous, seamless broadband to any device (all 50 billion of them) by 2020. But with different vendors promoting differing visions of what they called “5G”, there’s still a lot of confusion over what counts as 5G and what doesn’t. And operators being operators, what they really needed in 2015 was a benchmark they could get their heads around - how fast is it?
The ITU gave them the answer in June 2015. During a meeting of the ITU-R Working Party in the US, the ITU defined the goals, processes and timeline for 5G development. They even gave it a name: IMT-2020. And according to various internet reports, the ITU defined 5G as networks capable of transmitting data at up to 20 Gbps.
See Also
Telecom Asia December 2015 / January 2016
However, that number didn’t actually come from the ITU - not publicly. The ITU statement and links to supporting documents make no mention of data speeds or other performance benchmarks. It merely outlined the next steps in establishing “detailed technical performance requirements for the radio systems to support 5G, taking into account the needs of a wide portfolio of future scenarios and use cases, and then to specify the evaluation criteria for assessment of candidate radio interface technologies to join the IMT-2020 family. These new systems, set to become available in 2020, will usher in new paradigms in connectivity in mobile broadband wireless systems to support, for example, extremely high definition video services, real time low latency applications and the expanding realm of the Internet of Things (IoT).”
The 20 Gbps number came from the Korea Times, which cited claims form South Korea’s Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning that IMT-2020 networks must support data speeds up to 20 Gbps, and have a capacity to provide over 100 Mbps data rates to over 1 million IoT devices within a square kilometer.
Sister publication FierceWireless Europe contacted ITU spokesman Sanjay Acharya for clarification. Acharya said: “As of now, I understand the peak data rate of IMT-2020 for enhanced Mobile Broadband is expected to reach 10 Gbps. However, under certain conditions and scenarios, IMT-2020 would support up to 20 Gbps peak data rate.”
So between 10 Gbps and 20 Gbps, then.
LTE officially goes narrowband
All eyes were on the 3GPP in September as it proposed a narrowband version of LTE for inclusion in Release 13 that will allow LTE networks to support IoT applications with very low data rate and power consumption requirements. The technology, billed as “Narrowband IoT LTE,” is expected to be finalized in early 2016 - along with other IoT-oriented low-rate, lower-cost versions of LTE like LTE Cat 1, Cat 0 and LTE MTC.
One reason the decision raised so much interest - apart from a general eagerness by cellcos to use their LTE assets (and associated frequency bands) to cash in on the IoT - was a last-minute standards war for Narrowband IoT LTE.
Actually a number of companies have been clashing over narrowband LTE technologies for some time. But the week before the 3GPP meeting, Nokia Networks, Ericsson and Intel announced they had teamed up to back Narrow-Band Long-Term Evolution (NB-LTE), a technology seen as a direct challenge to Huawei Technologies, who backed its own Narrowband Cellular IoT (NB-CIoT), which had already gained operator support from heavy-hitters like Vodafone and China Unicom.
The main difference between NB-LTE and NB-CIoT came down to how much of existing LTE networks can be repurposed for IoT. Critics of NB-CIoT’s approach claimed that it requires new chipsets and wasn’t backwards compatible with any LTE network older than Release 13.
NB-LTE, by contrast, “can be fully integrated into existing LTE networks, works within current LTE bands and does not need an overlay network,” according to Nokia. In other words, NB-LTE uses more of the existing ecosystem and thus promises better economies of scale.
It’s a moot point now, of course - Narrowband IoT LTE in its final form is expected to use specs from both technologies.
According to Chris Taylor, director of RF and wireless components at Strategy Analytics, Narrowband IoT LTE will have a significant advantage over proprietary air interfaces for low-power wide area networking (LPWAN) technologies for M2M and IoT like SIGFOX, LoRaWAN (Long Range WAN) and Ultra Narrow Band (UNB) because of the huge base of LTE networks that will support it. Potential apps include metering, environmental and industrial monitoring, object location tracking, e-health, wearables and sensors.
“Narrowband IoT LTE would compete with other LPWAN air interfaces, but could complement local area wireless mesh networks using ZigBee, Bluetooth Smart or Z-Wave for example,” Taylor wrote in a blog post.
But while Narrowband IoT LTE is scheduled to be frozen in early 2016, there’s still a chance it may not make Release 13, Taylor added.
“The only concern we have heard so far is that including Narrowband IoT LTE in 3GPP Rel. 13 could delay the 3GPP release. Eager chip suppliers note that LTE MTC is already well defined, and provides low cost, low power consumption and coverage gains compared to LTE Cat. 0 and above, so perhaps the cellular industry should move Narrowband IoT LTE to Rel. 14.”
OTT video streaming goes large as HKTV gets small
Whatever else you can say about 2015, it was a banner year for OTT video streaming services. And you can probably blame Netflix for that.
Netflix has had eyes on the APAC market for some time, and launched services this year in Australia, New Zealand and Japan. But local players were already bracing themselves to compete with Netflix on its own terms. By the time Netflix launched services in Australia in late March, it already had competition in the form of Presto, Stan, Quickflix and Foxtel Play.
See Also
Telecom Asia December 2015 / January 2016
Meanwhile, Singtel kicked off the year by announced the formation of HOOQ, a partnership with Sony Pictures Television and Warner Bros Entertainment to launch a multi-screen OTT video platform that would be progressively rolled out across Singtel’s footprint in Asia-Pacific. So far this year it’s gone live in the Philippines, Thailand, and India.
In Malaysia, local investment firm Catcha Group announced in March it was teaming with Evolution Media Capital (a merchant bank focused on the media, sports, and entertainment industries) to launch a new subscription video-on-demand service across key Southeast Asian markets this year. The service, branded as “iflix”, went live in Malaysia and the Philippines in June.
Ironically, for all the excitement over OTT video services, one company that may not be riding that wave is HKTV - the TV channel masterminded by entrepreneur Ricky Wong.
HKTV made a major splash in the Hong Kong television market in 2014 by not only streaming its programs online (if only by necessity, being denied a free-to-air broadcast license and seeing its mobile TV plans thwarted), but by generating a lot of buzz with new content that looked fresh and innovative compared to the formulaic fare on offer from broadcasting giant TVB.
But despite some impressive viewer statistics when HKTV first started streaming in November 2014, the numbers declined after the novelty wore off. Moreover, HKTV hasn’t made enough money to offset its content-production costs. In February, HKTV halted plans for further TV production. In June, the company issued a profit warning, saying it expected a “a very significant increase” in losses for the first half of 2015, because revenue from licensing of program rights and advertising income was not enough to cover program costs.
Merger mania!
It was a pretty busy year in terms of telecoms-related M&As. On the operator side, the biggest regional buyout was Telstra’s $697 million acquisition of Pacnet, announced in late December 2014 and completed in April 2015. The deal doubled Telstra’s customer base in Asia, and increased its network reach and data center capabilities across the region.
However, the acquisition went somewhat sour in May after Telstra revealed it had discovered that Pacnet’s corporate IT network had been hacked less than two weeks before finalizing the acquisition - and that they hadn’t been told about it until after the deal was signed off.
See Also
Telecom Asia December 2015 / January 2016
Telstra group executive of global enterprise services Brendon Riley told Fairfax Media that while the incident didn’t affect the deal or diminish its value, “It would’ve been good to know about it a little earlier.”
Telstra reportedly considered legal action in May against the three investment management companies that arranged the Pacnet sale for failing to disclose the hack, but so far there’s been no movement on that front.
However, Telstra did strike a deal in November with Singaporean cloud and data center provider DeClout to sell off Pacnet’s assets in Singapore and Thailand for a combined $4.4 million because they did not align with Telstra’s strategy to grow in the SMB segment.
On the vendor side, the biggest deal was Nokia’s acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent in an all-share deal valued at €15.6 billion ($16.9 billion).
First announced in April and expected to be completed by the end of Q1 2016, the combined entity will feature four networking business groups: mobile networks, fixed networks, applications/analytics and IP/optical. The new Nokia will also be designed to have a common sales organization across business groups. The company would have six unit leaders focusing on operational issues, all drawn from the current Nokia.
Ovum analyst Daryl Schoolar commented that despite concerns over both companies’ track record with mergers -’one can easily argue if Nokia’s past hookup with Siemens and Alcatel’s merger with Lucent had gone better, this deal would not be taking place” - the combined entity does give Nokia the scale to compete in the RAN space and strengthens its portfolio in areas like small cells/hetnet and SDN/NFV.
As part of that deal, Nokia also revealed plans to create a new joint venture combining Nokia China with Alcatel-Lucent Shanghai Bell. Under the terms of the proposed arrangement, Nokia will own 50% plus one share of the joint venture. Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent would also be entitled to fair value compensation for the assets they contribute to the JV.
Other M&As of note:
- Infinera acquired Transmode in a deal worth $350 million, combining Transmode’s metro packet-optical applications with Infinera’s long-haul and metro cloud solutions.
- Keysight Technologies purchased Anite for approximately $600 million in cash in a deal that supports Keysight’s strategy to grow in wireless and expand its software offerings.
- Ciena purchased Cyan in a deal valued at $400 million, giving Ciena a serious boost in SDN capabilities and advancing its strategy to deliver a complete on-demand solution for virtualized networks and services.
- Redknee bought billing vendor Orga Systems, which declared bankruptcy earlier this year, for about $42.5 million, adding the Orga portfolio to the NSN assets it acquired in 2012.
- Ericsson acquired video encoding firm Envivio for $125 million to further strengthen its position in the rapidly changing TV and video sector.
- Amdocs acquired a substantial majority of Comverse’s business support systems (BSS) business unit assets for $272 million in cash. Amdocs said the acquisition would expand and diversify its customer base, particularly in Asia Pacific, Latin America and Europe, and including Europe’s cable and satellite market. Comverse, which is in the progress of divesting its assets, said it will continue to exist as a separate company, with a focus on expanding its global market leadership in digital services.
- Intel acquired programmable logic device vendor Altera in an all-cash transaction valued at about $16.7 billion. The acquisition will couple Intel’s products and manufacturing process with Altera’s FPGA technology. Intel said the combination is expected to enable new classes of products that meet customer needs in the data center and Internet of Things (IoT) market segments.
- Verizon announced an agreement to buy AOL for about $4.4 billion in cash, a 17% premium for AOL’s stockholders.
Users swoon as Telstra makes JV overtures for SMC
It may have been a big year for M&As, partnerships and joint ventures, but perhaps the biggest JV to cause a stir was one that hasn’t actually happened as we went to press: Telstra and Philippines conglomerate San Miguel Corporation (SMC).
Telstra announced in September it was in talks with SMC for a possible JV to offer wireless telecommunications services in the Philippines. SMC first entered the telecoms business in 2009 in the hopes of taking on the duopoly of PLDT and Globe Telecom. However, its attempts to introduce mass-market telecom services have not been successful. Its broadband offering Wi-Tribe, for example, has not taken off, and some of its offices are already closing shop.
See Also
Telecom Asia December 2015 / January 2016
But Telstra’s capital and technology coupled with SMC’s telecom assets and local business know-how could be a force to contend with. If the Telstra-SMC joint venture pushes through, Telstra could own up to 40% equity (the foreign ownership threshold permitted by the Philippine Constitution for public utilities).
Moreover, a Telstra-SMC tie-up would be able to get around the problem of infrastructure. Between SMC’s existing assets and Telstra’s ownership of Pacnet (which has an international submarine cable landing in Cavite and Batangas), the combined operator would have its own international submarine cable, landing station, backbone network, and spectrum.
There are still some missing pieces. Eastern’s backbone network is mostly in Luzon, and SMC has yet to massively deploy base stations in the last mile. But a Telstra-SMC JV would be in the coveted position of being able to compete against PLDT and Globe without having to rely heavily on leasing their infrastructure.
Put simply, a Telstra-SMC venture could provide the Philippines telecoms sector (and the internet market in particular) a badly needed shot in the arm via a strong and viable third player. Industry observers say the Philippines telecoms sector has stagnated, with PLDT and Globe controlling the fixed line, mobile phone and broadband markets to the point that they no longer have the incentive to outdo each other or improve customer service, instead falling back on a “follow-the-leader” type of competition.
SMC’s Ramon Ang believes that there’s room for a third telco, and promises to provide “a good network that will at least work.”
The expected JV has brought a sort of hope to Filipinos to address the sorry state of internet in the country.
Pilipinos are hopeful and excited about the competition, regardless of what it could bring. But for consumers who have long felt duped by their service providers, anything but the status quo is probably better.
Project Loon gets real
Project Loon - Google’s dream of connecting the unconnected with broadband-enabled balloons, first revealed in mid-2013 - took one step closer to reality in October this year when Indonesia’s three largest mobile operators - Indosat (now Ooredoo Indosat) Telkomsel and XL Axiata - agreed to test its balloon-powered internet service.
Announcing the arrangement, Google Asia Pacific said the three operators will evaluate using the technology as part of efforts to connect more Indonesians to the internet, thereby stimulating the nation’s digital economy.
See Also
Telecom Asia December 2015 / January 2016
Currently only around one in three Indonesians are connected to the internet, and connections are often “painfully slow,” the company said.
Project Loon envisions providing internet services via high-altitude balloons that act like floating mobile towers. The balloons would float in stratospheric winds at altitudes twice as high as commercial planes, beaming internet connections to the ground.
The balloons would be strategically placed in predictable slipstreams to ensure that as soon as one balloon floats away from a service area another takes its place.
Google said the technology has the potential to overcome the difficulties of deploying infrastructure in geographically-challenging regions such as Indonesia, which has more than 17,000 islands of jungles and mountains.
This is the second Project Loon test announced in Asia-Pacific, following a pilot test launched in New Zealand in 2013.
Compiled from original reports by: Fiona Chau, Dylan Bushell-Embling, Stefan Hammond, Aaron Koh, Grace Mirandilla-Santos, Don Sambandaraksa and John C. Tanner
This article was first published in Telecom Asia Dec 2015/Jan 2016 edition