Small Cell Forum strengthens global presence
Small Cell Forum has announced two new appointments to its board and new members to strengthen and expand its global presence and influence.
The two new board members are Peter Zhou, president of small cell product line at Huawei and Tareq Amin, senior vice president of wireless at Reliance Jio Infocomm.
At the same time, the Forum will create two new regional operator groups to further pool local knowledge and become a central point to improve understanding of regional requirements for small cell and HetNet technology.
The new Asia group will be led by operators China Unicom and Reliance Jio; while the North American group will be led by AT&T and Sprint.
Gen Cao, senior engineer at China Unicom will co-chair the Asia Regional Operator Group with Satish Jamadagni, assistant vice president at Reliance Jio.
David Orloff, director small cells platform at AT&T will co-chair the North America Group with Mark Lipford, director of global standards and ecosystem development at Sprint.
Sandip Das joins Analysys Mason as senior adviser
Former Reliance Jio managing director, Sandip Das, is set to join global telecoms and media consulting firm Analysys Mason as a senior adviser on November 2, 2015.
Prior to Reliance Jio, Das worked as Maxis Group CEO and before that he was the CEO of Hutchison Essar Telecom (now Vodafone India).
In his new role, Das will help Analysys Mason, a global telecom and media consulting firm, serve its telecom clients in the region. He will work directly with the firm's clients including incumbent telecom operators in the country to the get best of the international and domestic talent.
“Having worked with Analysys Mason as a client in the past, the firm’s intellectual rigor and in-depth industry knowledge, focus on ethics and principle-based consulting, and un-matched track record of solving some of the most pressing C-level strategy and operations issues impacting the telecoms industry has me looking forward to working alongside Analysys Mason, a firm that I have utmost respect for,” said Das.
Analysys Mason said the announcement comes at a time when the research firm has seen explosive growth in its advisory business in India over the last few years.
“Our single TMT industry focus and the rigor of our work has established Analysys Mason as the first port-of-call for a large number of telecom operators in the region across a wide variety of topics such as spectrum strategy, digital services strategy, pricing and go-to-market strategy, as well as operational transformation strategy,” said Rohan Dhamija, partner and head for India and South Asia at Analysys Mason.
“Given Das’ wealth of experience, we look forward to him working with clients to help them traverse the crossroads that the Indian telecoms industry finds itself at: on the one hand, data growth, digital services, and the recent reduction in regulatory overhang (for example, allowing of spectrum trading and sharing) present significant opportunity, while on the other hand, redefinition of the competitive landscape and the evolution of OTT offerings requires existing operators to rethink how they go about their business,” added Dhamija.
Inmarsat names Mario Franci VP of Inflight Services
Inmarsat has appointed Mario Franci as vice president of inflight services. As part of the aviation management team, he will focus on developing the aviation cabin business for Inmarsat, working with airlines to jointly commercialize the services.
Franci was previously Inmarsat’s VP of European Aviation Communications and led the air-to-ground component of the recently announced European Aviation Network (EAN), the first aviation passenger connectivity solution in Europe to combine an advanced satellite network and LTE-based ground network.
He will continue to oversee the commercial delivery of EAN under his new role as vice president of inflight services.