The move towards group billing as a service and a call for reform of FDI rules were hot topics on the agenda on day one of Carriers World Asia in Bangkok, as network operators face margin squeeze.
Simon Perkins, CEO of Hello Axiata, spoke of the emerging trend in the industry whereby billing and analytics are now conducted at a regional group level rather than individually by each operator by themselves. This allows the telco to retain the control so desired yet take advantage of economy of scale of cloud computing without having to resort to third party providers over the open Internet.
He cited Digicell as an example. It operates in a number of markets in the Pacific Islands. Billing, data mining for all the opcos are done in one place. This is billing as a service but only across the organisation.
“Telecoms is a scale business. You must centralise operations across markets. Services are commoditized. I'm skeptical whether you can really stop this OTT threat we all face. Unless you are a really big telco group, you cannot compete with cloud operators. Telcos need to take advantage of group scale and centralize as many functions as you can. It's a low margin game, the lowest cost operator will survive,” Perkins said.
Kranphol Asawasuwan, CEO of Symphony, a Thailand based fibre network provider, spoke of expansion into Cambodia, Malaysia (Q2/12) and Myanmar (Q3/12) and Laos in the future for transit to China.
He said that Symphony's success is from being carrier neutral as virtually all other network operators in the region have potential conflicts of interest with their partners. Symphony only does network. It does not provide ISP or data centre services. He hopes to replicate this neutrality stance in other countries going forth.