It was a week that saw flood damage for Australian operators, VoIP crackdowns in China and more regulatory demands on RIM.
The Australian state of Queensland was hit hard by massive flooding during the week, and telcos were not immune. Vodafone Australia, Telstra and Optus experienced service disruptions due to flood damage, as did ISPs including Internode, iiNet, iPrimus and Exetel.
Vodafone Australia was already having a bad week without coping with natural disasters after news emerged that private details of around 4 million Vodafone users – including credit card details – were available on a web site accessible by potentially thousands of people, including employees at Vodafone retail stores and resellers.
And that’s on top of last week’s news that Vodafone Australia is already facing the prospect of a class-action lawsuit over allegations of poor network quality.
It wasn’t a great week for Singaporean operator StarHub either. The telco mistakenly reissued 18 mobile numbers already in use by rivals SingTel Mobile and M1 to new customers at the end of last year. Starhub apologized and said the problem was due to an error made during a recent upgrade of its backend system.
It was also the week that saw Skype dodge a bullet in China following last week’s news that the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology's (MIIT) planned to crack down on “illegal” VoIP services. The MIIT has been vague on what constitutes “illegal” VoIP, but clarified that it doesn’t include Skype and its JV partner in China, Tom Online.
In other clampdown news, RIM agreed to develop a solution to filter porn in Indonesia in a bid to stave off a ban on BlackBerry services there, but the company faces another (and increasingly familiar) issue: the government is also pressing RIM to enable interception of BlackBerry messages by security officials.
RIM also delivered a solution to allow monitoring of its messenger and personal email service for India , but reiterated claims it is currently unable to provide access to its highly-encrypted corporate emails.
In operator news for the week, Chunghwa Telecom reported a 1.6% increase in quarterly profit after a reduction in taxes and higher revenue from its internet services, while Thailand’s TOT said it expects to post a loss exceeding 1 billion baht ($32.8 million) for 2010 due to high expenses and the aftermath of the country’s worst floods in years, and Nepalese mobile operator United Telecom Limited (UTL) was told it may lose its license for alleged failure to pay royalties.
On the 4G front, SK Telecom gave a timetable on its LTE rollout, with plans to launch LTE services in Seoul in Q3, while Wimax officials promised that the next generation of the technology, Wimax2 (802.16m), will be commercialized this year.
In the vendor sector, ZTE touted its chops on LTE patents, Qualcomm promised 2011 will be the year of the Snapdragon for tablet PC makers, and HTC reported that its Q4 net profit almost trebled year-on-year on strong growth in smartphone sales.
And finally, it was the week in which we learned that North Korea has the highest adoption rate of 3G in the world. Almost all of North Korea’s mobile subscribers use monopoly 3G operator, Koryolink, according to TeleGeography.
Of course, it helps to remember that the TeleGeography figures represent 3G adoption by existing mobile users, that Koryolink has a little over 301,000 subscribers in a country of 24 million people, and that members of the public have been barred from subscribing to Sun Net, the country’s sole 2G network, since 2004.
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