Hutch’s entry into Indonesia’s mobile market as the 5th significant operator has started putting downward pressure on mobile calling prices, as I had predicted in my Oped piece Lower mobile prices: Through competition or profit regulation? in January of 2007. It is too early to call it a “price war” as the article below does, but the signs that prices are coming down is evident. Indonesia’s mobile retail prices are some of the highest in Asia and there is enough room for the prices to drop further. Currently, Hutch’s competitors are reacting by issuing promotions to match the new entrant’s offering, but this does not per se signify a permanent cut in prices. At the end of the promotion period the operators have a choice of reverting back…
Tag Archive for 'Hong Kong'Page 2 of 3
Call for Papers: Infrastructure Regulation: What works, Why, and How do we know?
Deadline: 05 December 2008.
Report on the 11th LIRNE.NET Executive Training Course on Regulation, 25 February – 3 March 2007, conducted by LIRNEasia and CONNECTasia Forum Pte.Ltd.
Rohan Samarajiva, Course Director
The 11th LIRNE.NET course on “Telecom Reform: Strategies to achieve connectivity and convergence,” was held February 25th - March 3rd, 2007 at the Changi Village Hotel, Singapore. It was attended by 33 persons from 13 countries, ranging from Mongolia to Congo and South Africa to Bhutan.
Among the participants were 13 persons from regulatory agencies, including three members of regulatory collegiums. Eleven persons from the management of telecom operators, and nine from research organizations, universities and civil society made up the balance. Twenty were men; and 13 women.
The course had two components: a conventional lecture and assignment based module of five…
The Indonesian government imposed unreasonable burdens on the new entrant for international service in a recently issued White Paper 140. LIRNEasia highlighted the unfairness of burdening new entrants with obligations that the two existing incumbents (Telkom & Indosat) were not subjected too in comments it submitted to DGPOSTEL (one of the two regulatory bodies):
4.4 The Indonesian policymakers may have misunderstood the concept of asymmetric regulation. Asymmetric rules place additional burdens on dominant group of providers that other operators are not subjected to. In the current White Paper, many additional burdens are imposed on the new entrant that are not imposed on the two incumbents, PT Telkom & PT Indosat. Requirements for building FO from Indonesia to TIER-1 IP backbone, building domestic FO to Internet Exchange, building…
Hutchison exits India and Vodafone enters. Will this accelerate Indian mobile growth to Indonesia and Pakistan levels? No clear evidence of increased investment; new pricing strategies, etc. yet.
BBC NEWS | Business | Vodafone buys Indian mobile firm
Vodafone has bought a controlling stake in Indian mobile phone firm Hutchison Essar for $11.1bn (£5.7bn).
The deal for 67% of the company gives Vodafone access to India’s rapidly growing mobile phone market, where Essar has a share of about 16%.
It ends a long bidding war for the Essar stake owned by Hong Kong’s Hutchison Telecommunications.
UK firm Vodafone is moving into emerging economies to make up for slow growth in mature markets like Europe.
According to Vodafone, India is the fastest growing mobile market in the world, with around 6.5…
FLAG Telecom plans to deploy the largest IP-based submarine cable network that will connect 60 countries, including many that currently have poor connectivity by 2009. India, Indonesia, and Philippines are among the countries that FLAG’s NGN network will have a presence in.
Reliance to carry FLAG far and wide:
“We live in a world where there is too much of bandwidth for some, little for others and none for many - there is unequal access to bandwidth in and across countries, continents and communities,” said Anil Dhirubhai Ambani, chairman, Reliance Communications. “FLAG NGN will democratise digital access,” he added.
FLAG NGN will comprise of our systems. FLAG NGN System 1 would cover Asia that includes India, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei and Honk Kong. FLAG NGN…
The strong quake off Taiwan’s coast on December 26 damaged six separate submarine cables and severely disrupted telecom links in the East, Southeast and South Asia. Internet connectivity in a number of countries are either down or are slowed down thanks to taffic that is being rerouted over networks that have escaped damage. Most of Jakarta (Indonesia) and Pondicherry (Southern India) have been without Internet until this afternoon (Dec 27) at least. In our office in Sri Lanka, SLT’s ADSL connection (though congested) is working. However, Lankacom’s leased line is down since it probably connects to the Internet backbone via Singapore.
These disruptions have major consequences for any business that relies on telecom for delivering their services, including, banking, trading, call centers, remotely managed services etc.…
Rohan Samarajiva and Divakar Goswami from LIRNEasia chaired back-to-back Forum sessions at the ITU World 2006 in Hong Kong on December 7.
The Building Digital Communities session, chaired by Divakar, covered a wide-swathe of topics. In his opening remarks [PDF], he outlined on some of the issues that would be covered in the presentations and discussion to follow.
In his Keynote address, the Indonesian Minister of Communication & IT, Sofyan Djalil proposed that global equipment manufacturers should adopt a new business model where they share some of the investment risk with operators while deploying infrastructure in financially unviable areas in developing countries. He suggested that the current model where developing countries are only purchasers of high cost equipment and services, breeds dependency and is unsustainable in the long run. In…
Nov 13, 2006
By Tony Chan, Wireless Asia
http://www.telecomasia.net/article.php?id_article=2622
This article raises the important question of affordability of access to services on mobile networks versus services on fixed networks (e.g HSDPA versus broadband). Some pertinent questions raised include:
Does coverage mean cheaper access to telecommunication services? While it very well might be cheaper for governments to provide mobile coverage to rural areas, are the ongoing costs of access cheaper as well?
Although the author doubts whether users in rural areas of emerging Asia can afford even the cheapest mobile packages ($5/month) that we are paying today in Hong Kong, the 2005 Shoestring research proved otherwise, with 34 % spending USD4-8 on mobile services, and 30 % pendingmore than USD8 per month –significant proportions of their monthly household incomes (below USD100). Similarly,…
Just returned from the sensory overload of the ITU Telecom World exhibition and forum in Hong Kong. One of the buzzwords/phrases floating around this year is multiple play. Triple play is passe though a few are hanging on with quadruple play.
Given my recent column in LBO, my mind was on payments. Where in the multiple play talk was payments? This was the question I raised at the session.
Now, as I wade through the piled up e-mail, I find this fascinating link sent by our good friend Randy Spence which is dead on the point. Does this not suggest that payment is the truly hot topic?
Sunday Independent: Cellphone companies push the power of mobile business services to hook consumers
Hylton Kallner, the general manager of marketing for Discovery,…
The Indonesian Minister for Communication and Information Technology, Dr Sofyan Djalil, presented a number of new initiatives for removing the barriers to Internet growth in his country at Building Digital Communities forum session at the ITU World 2006 event in Hong Kong on December 7, 2006.
Divakar Goswami, LIRNEasia’s Director, Organizational and Projects, who was moderating the panel asked the following question:
One of the first achievements of your government was to delicense the 2.4 GHz frequency that allowed communities to use Wi-Fi extensively in the country. Despite that, Indonesia currently has Internet penetration of 0.69 percent. You have about 124 ISPs that operate in Indonesia. How do you explain the low penetration and what are the barriers preventing Internet from growing faster in Indonesia? When we look…
Rohan Samarajiva and Divakar Goswami, chaired sessions at the first Telecom World event , ITU Telecom World 2006, to be held in Asia, in Hong Kong SAR, 3-8 December 2006. This event, held once in four years, is normally held in Geneva. It was moved to Hong Kong to recognize the leading role of the Asia Pacific in the ICT sector today (see Figure 1).Samarajiva and Goswami were the only persons from Sri Lanka featured in the program of the Forum at Telecom World.
Figure 1: 
Goswami, lead researcher on LIRNEasia’s Indonesia ICT sector and regulatory performance study, chaired a session that included keynote presentations by Dr Sofyan Djalil, the Indonesian Minister of ICTs. Samarajiva’s session on universal access included keynotes by the Vice President of China Unicom,…
An executive course on telecom regulation, including World Dialogue on Regulation Expert Forum on Sector and Regulatory Performance Indicators
Offered by LIRNEasia and CONNECTasia Forum Pte. Ltd.
February 25th - March 3rd, 2007. Changi Village Hotel, Singapore
The 2007 course is designed to enhance the strategic thinking of a select group of senior decision makers in the telecom and related sectors in the Asia Pacific and elsewhere. The focus will be on the most current strategic issues.
Extended Family
05 June 2006 14:23:29
Sri Lanka opens the door for fifth mobile phone operator
June 5, 2006 (LBO) – Sri Lanka plans to expand its mobile phone market to five players, in a bid to bring down costs of telephony, the telecom regulator said Monday.
Sri Lanka’s mobile market had grown 53.5 percent to 3.34 million customers as at end 2005, according to TRC figures.
The island’s cellular penetration is expected to increase to 20.0 percent in 2006, from 17.3 percent last year, according to industry analysts.
“Mobile phones are one of the fastest growing segments in the economy now, and it is showing potential to grow further,” notes Ratwatte.
Dialog Telekom, currently dominates the market with over 2-million subscribers.
…
Colombo, Sri Lanka, 19 December 2005: A survey of the websites of National Telecommunication Regulatory Authorities in the Asia Pacific region has revealed that six countries – Australia, Hong Kong, Jordan, Malaysia, Pakistan and Singapore – stand above the rest, with Pakistan leading.
The research was conducted by LIRNEasia, and supported by the International Development Research Centre of Canada (IDRC) as part of the research program on regulatory and sector performance indicators in the ICT [information and communication technology] sector……..
English Press Release: Pakistan leads in providing regulatory services on-line
Call-for-Papers
A well developed information infrastructure is critical to the emerging knowledge society. Arguably, it is the availability of network-based development toolkit that enables consumers to generate value for the suppliers in the so-called reverse economy scenario. Similarly, it is the availability of ubiquitous Web-based information access that provides deep support to individuals in the new paradigm of distributed capitalism. It might not be extravagant to claim that a sustainable knowledge society, to a great extent, relies on a sophisticated information infrastructure.
As part of the information infrastructure, mobile communication has developed at an extraordinarily high speed in both developing and developed countries. In 2002, the total number of mobile phone users historically surpassed that of the fixed-line telephone users on a global scale. In the…
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