Licensing the 2100 MHz spectrum band for 3G services would enable Bangladeshi operators to launch mobile broadband services, which their customers can use to gain fast and easy access to the Internet and online services, it said on Wednesday.

Bangladesh’s mobile sector has grown rapidly, with user numbers reaching more than 45 million at end-September from 200,000 in 2001, while the country has only 1.32 million fixed-line phones.

“Laying new fixed-line connections is expensive and inefficient, so high-speed mobile networks are Bangladesh’s best bet to realise the many social and economic benefits that arise from widespread access to broadband services,” said Ricardo Tavares, senior vice president for public policy at the GSMA.

Analysts predict the number of subscribers could top 70 million by 2011, nearly half the country’s population of more than 140 million people.

Many developing countries, including Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Kenya and South Africa, have already deployed mobile broadband services enabling their people to get easy access to information on health, education, job opportunities and agriculture.

There are six cellphone carriers in Bangladesh, including five foreign operators.

Read the full story in Reuters here.

Both SLT and Dialog boast about their island wide networks. These backbones, they say, are capable of delivering ‘kiri’ to rural communities too. ICTA does not let a day go without mentioning taking ICTs to villages. The reality, as we have experienced for the last three days, is different.

Apparently 3G services are unavailable in Polonnaruva.  All Mobitel could deliver was GPRS at a speed less than 5 kbps. (top) Good that they provide the speedometer on PC. Visiting any site, including speedtest.net is impossible at that rate. (1/200 of the promised speed)

The competition was not too different (does that surprise anyone?).  Apart from delivering GPRS at similar speeds, Dialog was not capable even of delivering more than 80 kbps thorough its hotel wi-fi network – that too within selected hours with a weak connection breaking every 30 minutes or so.  There were long periods the network was simply down. Minimum prepaid charge is Rs. 250 + taxes, irrespective of the usage (less than 30 minutes in our case) and user satisfaction – er, dissatisfaction.

Perhaps it is the fault of King Parakramabahu. Taking into account the broadband needs of his descendents he could have moved the kingdom to a location near Colombo – where at least the last-mile conditions are not this pathetic.

Dialog 3G will deliver the unique communication channel of video calling to customers in Jaffna who will now be able to have face to face conversations with their loved ones locally and internationally.

Read the full story in Daily Mirror here.

Indian telecom giant Bharti Airtel, which had announced its entry into the Sri Lankan mobile phone sector with much fanfare last year, is experiencing delays and may well be re-drawing its investment plans for the island country, says a Sri Lankan telecommunication expert.

Rohan Samarajeewa, former head of Sri Lanka’s Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (TRC), told IANS that while there was no doubt that Bharti Airtel was committed to operating in Sri Lanka, it had altered its timetable and could well be scaling down its original investment plans.

The reasons for the delay in starting the operations were in the realm of speculation, Samarajeewa said. But he did point to a possibility of difficulties in getting frequencies from the TRC, as it is generally recognized that the allotment of frequencies tends to be “highly politicised” in Sri Lanka.

The parent company in India could also be changing its priorities as regards capital allocations, in the context of the growing challenges in the more lucrative Indian domestic market, Samarajeewa said.

“Even assuming that the mobile phone market in Sri Lanka is 10 million, it is still only the size of a metropolis in India. It is therefore possible that Bharti Airtel is looking at some of the Indian states with greater interest,” he said.

In 2007, Bharti Airtel had set up a Sri Lankan subsidiary, Bharti Airtel Lanka Pvt Ltd., got a license to provide 2G and 3G services in collaboration with China’s Huawei Technologies, announced an investment of $200 million and began to recruit a large staff. The services were to begin by 2007 end. This subsequently got postponed to early 2008. But, as yet, there are no signs of an early start.

“When it announced its entry, I expected Bharti Airtel to literally slaughter the existing players. But given the recent changes in the price structure here, and the intense competition in the field, the Indian company will have to be quite creative if it is to be more than just a minor player,” Samarajeewa said.

The market is small and crowded. The fixed line and mobile phone penetration in Sri Lanka is very high. Forty to 50 percent of the households in the island (excluding the war-affected north and east) have access to a phone. Out of a total population of 20 million, six million have mobile phones. With the recently announced price reductions, the user-base is expected to rise to 10 million, or half the total population of the country.

There are already four players in the field. Among them, Dialog Telekom, a unit of Telecom Malaysia, has been the leader, controlling 60 percent of the market. Dialog has enjoyed brand loyalty for a considerable length of time throughout Sri Lanka, and is, therefore, no pushover.

Bharti Airtel would have to come up with innovative packages to attract the bottom rungs of the socio-economic ladder, an area of rapid growth in the foreseeable future, Samarajeewa pointed out. While price will be of the highest importance for those in the bottom-end of the social scale, technical qualities will be a clincher among the upper strata of society.

Asked for the reasons for the delay in starting operations, Bharti Airtel Lanka’s CEO, Amali Nanayakkara, said her company had very stringent requirements in regard to the infrastructure and that it would not start operations until all the requirements were met.

But she denied that there were any difficulties in getting official clearances. The setting up of the network was also proceeding satisfactorily. The company was “very happy” with the cooperation of the Sri Lankan authorities, and the pace of the work was also “very good”, Nanayakkara told IANS.

As for the price factor, she said that it was nothing new. “It was there right from the time we came here,” she said.

—

More coverage available at:

AOL News

Kerala.com

NDTV.com

Lankaeverything.com

Elakiri.com 

In yet another blow to the existing GSM operators, the Communication Ministry has decided to auction spectrum for third generation (3G) mobile services and wireless broadband services through technologies such as Wi-Max.

The auction will be open to new companies wanting to foray into the telecom sector as well as established foreign telecom players. The existing operators had wanted the auction for 3G services to be limited to the licence holders.

The Ministry’s decision to open up the bidding to all players is also a move away from the telecom regulator’s recommendations that it be restricted to existing operators. The move gives a chance to the likes of Deutsche Telecom, AT&T and new Indian players such as Unitech and Hindujas, which may not get spectrum in the 2G band given the huge rush, to enter the high growth telecoms market. This means that existing GSM operators such as Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Essar, after being asked to rope in more subscribers for being eligible for more spectrum for 2G services, will now have to fight it out for a piece of 3G spectrum.

Read the full story in ‘THE HINDU Business Line’

Now the French telecoms regulator has approved plans to allow the incumbent GSM network operators to reuse their 900Mhz bands for 3G services. 

ART has also announced that any 3G new entrant authorised following the application procedure for the fourth UMTS licence would also have access to the 900 MHz spectrum once it has been returned by the existing 2G operators. Read more.

This has not deterred the state-owned GSM operator in Nepal, one of the world’s poorest countries, from launching 3G services. The 3G SIM card reportedly costs about US$64.50 with 3G tariffs said to be similar to that of prepaid rates. The service launched in the Ring Road area of the capital city Kathmandu. The launch hit an early snag within days, with the independent regulator objecting to Nepal Telecom’s setting a new subscription fee for 3G services without its permission. A spokesperson for the Authority said that under the country’s Telecommunications Act, prices levied by a service provider must first be approved by the NTA and the rates published as directed by the agency. Read more.

However, yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (March 15, 2007) seems to suggest that high speed 3G wireless technology like HSDPA can bring broadband on a large scale to Indonesians. It (misleadingly) implies that since HSDPA is merely a software upgrade to 3G networks it will not require any new major telecom infrastructure investment in Indonesia. The fact is that 3G services have just been launched in the last quarter of 2006 in some urban areas concentrated in and around Jakarta. The Indonesian operators have a long way to go to upgrade all their base stations to support 3G. Even if the base stations were upgraded to 3G standards there are no shortcuts to building backbone infrastructure (preferably fiber optic) to connect the base stations. Furthermore, large parts of eastern Indonesia do not have any connectivity leave alone 2G or 3G.

Realistically, HSDPA will be a connectivity solution for those customers who have been starved off ADSL connectivity thanks to Pt Telkom’s “Dog in the manger” attitude. Those customers who can afford HSDPA compatible handsets will be a very small subset of potential Internet users in Indonesia. 2+G connectivity solutions will continue to remain relevant for a vast majority of Indonesians.
Indonesia Embraces 3G to Get Up to Speed on Web (Wall Street Journal March 15, 2007)
JAKARTA, Indonesia — Indonesia’s rapid adoption of cutting-edge cellphone technology for Internet access is helping Southeast Asia’s largest economy to catch up with its technologically savvier neighbors.

A sprawling nation of 220 million people and more than 13,000 islands, Indonesia has one of the least-developed communications systems in Asia. Getting a phone connection without echoes or distortion is a matter of luck, and Internet connections relying on cable networks are among the slowest in the region.

The arrival of High-Speed Downlink Packet Access, or HSDPA — a software upgrade to 3G mobile-phone technology that allows users faster access to the Internet through cellular networks — could help change that[..]

HSDPA technology, pioneered in Indonesia by PT Indonesia Satellite Corp., or Indosat, offers Internet download speeds at least six times as fast as connections relying on cable, a wider difference than in a more-developed economy. And because it’s an add-on to 3G technology, it doesn’t need any major new telecom infrastructure — just some equipment attached to existing mobile base stations.

Indonesia also is primed for expansion because less than 30% of its population currently uses cellphones, compared with 80% in Malaysia and 40% in the Philippines. Indonesia has 65 million mobile users; industry analysts forecast that number will reach 100 million by 2010.

Since starting its service in November, Indosat has signed 60,000 customers in Jakarta and Surabaya, Indonesia’s second-largest city. Working with Ericsson and Nokia, the company hopes to add coverage to eight other major cities by the end of March. “It’s going to be very popular,” predicts Djarot Handoko, a spokesman for Indosat.

Nokia is working with another local telecommunications company, PT Telekomunikasi Selular, to start an HSDPA service in Indonesia later this year. Indonesia is one of the biggest potential markets for 3G, says a Nokia executive advising the company[..]

Dev Yusmananda, an executive at PT Excelcomindo Pratama, which has just started a similar service, says the prospective Indonesian market is huge. “We’re talking about it [HSDPA] as a substitution for a broadband connection,” he says.

Ironically, the interest generated by the arrival of HSDPA is a consequence of Indonesia’s failure to build a decent national cable grid. The country had plans to lay an extensive network in the 1990s, but the Asian financial crisis in 1997-98 intervened, and many projects were shelved. Many of the cables that were installed were poorly laid. Recent flooding in Jakarta damaged networks and left many people without Internet access for days[..]

The prduence of using beauty pagents needs to be questioned. The failures of 3G auctions in Europe in 2000 has been mentioned as one of the reasons for opting for a beauty pagent. However the failures of those auctions stemmed from operators’ over-estimating the potential of a new and untested service. It is unlikely that operators would make the same mistake again – my argument being once-bitten, twice shy.

Economists would argue that auctions, with sufficent safe guards to eliminate (or at the very least minimize) collusion/signalling and to enforce rollout is the best method of allocating scare resources. I am not an economist but the arguement makes sense and the process can occur in a transparent and efficient manner. License allocation by beauty pagents don’t have a reputation for transparency. Recent auctions, such the recently concluded USD 13.9 billion license auction in the US (Washington Post article), have learnt from past mistakes (The FCC included some provisions in the current auction to take care of problems that emerged in the big 1990s auctions when one winning company filed for bankruptcy and succesfully took FCC to the courts to prevent them from repossessing their licenses- see the related IHT article ).

Lets see what TRAI’s final decision is, but at the very least I hope they provide sufficent justifications for their choice.

The Telecoms Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has issued its highly anticipated consultation paper covering wireless broadband services, including UMTS and WiMAX.

The paper is available for download here [PDF]
The paper has identified two overriding issues concerning the introduction of high speed wireless services – namely, frequency allocation and licence fees. The issue of frequencies is already a hot topic in the market, with the nation’s GSM and CDMA operators clashing over their preferred spectrum for 3G services.

The TRAI had previously proposed allocating spectrum in the IMT-2000 standard 2GHz frequency band, for both GSM and CDMA operators, designed to support both W-CDMA and CDMA2000 1xEV-DO 3G development.

Whilst the country’s GSM operators supported the plan, the CDMA lobby is demanding that the 1900MHz band be made available, saying that there is a dearth of CDMA equipment and handsets available for use in the 2GHz spectrum. The issue of spectrum fees is similarly undecided and the TRAI is asking whether the pricing should be determined by an auction or other bidding process, or be cost-based dependent on the price for redeployment of spectrum. The regulator is inviting comments and suggestions on the paper by the end of the month.