Optical fiber deployment in Cambodia

Myanmar has long been seen under the very negative light of a military junta dictatorship and the political repression that goes with it. But over the last few months, the situation has taken a turn for the better. The political changes are bringing hope for more democracy and the country is slowly opening its borders and its market. The EU is about to suspend most of economical sanctions imposed until now, as the United States did.

Justifiably, the entire world has its eyes riveted on the huge opportunities the country could offer. However this recent opening should not make us forget about the many other opportunities offered by the countries in the area.

CPIT, a Bangkok-based company offering software solution to enterprises is looking at expanding its activty to these new markets.

The first door CPIT decided to knock to was Cambodia. While the country is geographically next to Thailand, the market is definitely different.  The company decided to focus mainly on the mobile operators and ISPs. The particularity of the telecom market in Cambodia is the large number of actors it involves: Since a few months now, 10 companies have a license (the latest one having been granted in the beginning of 2012), which elevates Cambodia to the highest rank for the ratio of Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) compared to the population (currently 14 million). This “over-population” leads to a raging price war, making Cambodia a challenging market for MNOs and vendors..

Then there is Laos. The situation here is, once again, quite specific. and the actors are quite different from Cambodia. Lao PDR is a communist country, and the biggest companies are, one way or another, tied to the local government. The infrastructure is still very minimal, even compared to Cambodia, and the market hasn’t reached its maturity, but this also means that there is a good potential for growth in the coming years.

As we have seen, the neighbors of the Land of Smiles are quite promising for Telecom solution providers, and it would be a mistake to dismiss them because of their level of development. Cambodia, Lao PDR and Myanmar are now attracting a lot of attention from dynamic companies like CPIT despite the many challenges they will have to face. Will they be up to it?

In 2012, Asia-Pacific region has reached a capital expenditure in the mobile sector similar to Europe and North America according to a report from ABI Research.

In this reports, Jake Saunders, vice president of forecasting at ABI Research, said 62 percent of the mobile capital expenditure will be invested in radio access network (RAN) deployment while EPC (Evolved Packet Core) and gateway upgrades to the core network will make up 9 percent of spending. Another key
area which operators are looking at is improving in-building wireless coverage into dense urban centers at 5.7 percent of mobile capital spending.
One of the most striking illustration of the gap that was bridged in the region is the investment in 4G networks. 63% of Asia’s carriers have LTE rolled out, are conducting trials, or have announced plans. Out of 110 networks, 10 operators (9%) have commercial 4G LTE (Long Term Evolution) networks up and running. Another 58 (53%) either have specific plans to roll out LTE or are conducting trials.

As an example, the research company highlighted several countries for which spending on LTE technology is following this trend:
In China, despite the absence of 4G licenses, China Mobile has already started investing in 4G facilities. The 655 million subscriber operator plans to ramp up its TD-LTE base station count to over 20,000 TD-LTE base stations by December and 200,000 by 2013.
The report noted that investment in telecom equipment in India also extends to 2G and 3G cell sites as the operator Idea Cellular has continued to roll out 2,270 2G cell sites and 1,176 3G cell sites in 2011.
In Southeast Asia, commercial networks were already up and running in Malaysia where WiMax is preferred over LTE, Singapore and the Philippines, it said.

In this context, Japan’s biggest carrier NTT Docomo announced it reached 2 million subscribers on its LTE service Xi, with a growth rate quadrupled between the first and second million. This demonstrates that there is a real demand from consumers for such a service and justifies the important investments observed by ABI Research.

Incubators aren’t a new thing, but the recent announcement that Telefonica is to open a Telecom incubator in London, and later in other places in Europe, follows a trend showing spike of activity in this domain.
Telefónica’s Wayra incubator is to roll out across Europe this year in an ambitious program that will see academies in London, Ireland, Germany and the Czech Republic. The Spanish Telco pledged “funding in excess of €1 million”, as it officially announced the launch of its initiative to support U.K. startups today.

The London academy, to be housed in Tottenham Court Road in London’s West End near the London University College, will house some 20 start ups for up to six months.
The idea, an extension of a program started in South America, is simple: Anyone with a technology idea can submit it for consideration until April 22. A judging panel comprising Telefonica , bona fide UK entrepreneurs and business leaders will select 20 inspiring ideas install them in the newly created academy and grant them between €50,000 – €70,000 in return for a 10% stake. High-growth companies can then go on to a second-stage academy called Talentum, where venture capitalists will be brought into play. Successful companies will be allowed to market to Telefonica’s 300 million customers worldwide.

Meanwhile, other initiatives are targeting startups in Asia: Globe Telecom, with support from its partner, Singtel of Singapore and the Ayala conglomerate are launching a program aimed at setting up the first telco incubator in the Philippines.

Earlier this year, it was announced that India’s first telecom business incubator will be set up in Kerala under Infosys co-founder and Executive Co-chairman Kris Gopalakrishnan. The Indian Telecom Innovation Hub will focus primarily on student start-ups from college campuses and would be modeled on technology incubators in the Silicon Valley.

And not later than last month, China Telecom unveiled an in-house Cloud Computing Incubation program. The operator has since contacted employees for project and team proposals. Each team will include at least three people, and will have a project term of two years, with a total of RMB 200 million (USD $17.000.000) in funding available. Teams will receive an initial investment of RMB 50,000 to 100,000. Employees opting to start new projects – which will be required to be telecommunications-related, with primary focuses on mobile internet, cloud computing, and e-commerce – will have their previous positions held for them.

Telecom Operators are looking for talent and new ideas to make sure that they will remain relevant in a world where new technologies seem to pop up every day. It is crucial for them to stay ahead and investing in such incubators should help them to keep up.

Every New Year is traditionally the occasion for companies and analyst to elaborate a few predictions for the coming months. While perilous, this exercise is always interesting to conduct.
The Top 10 ICT predictions of IDC (International Data Corporation) for Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) have now been released for 2012 and bring a very interesting insight.

We will summarize them below. For a more extensive analysis, please go to IDC website: http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prSG23155411

The main point made by IDC analyst is that 2012 is a year marked by uncertainties and cautious spending.
While this might seem a quite gloomy perspective, IDC is still expecting growth of ICT spending in 2012; around 10.4% more than in 2011. This growth rate is however lower than the previous years and is expected to continue slowing down towards 9% over the next 4-5 years.

Considering this, here are their Top 10 ICT predictions for 2012 in APEJ:

1. In Emerging, To Emerging: Alternative Commercial and Delivery Models for the Emerging Asian Enterprise Will Drive a New Wave of ICT Spend in 2012
A new profile of companies is emerging in Asian emerging economies and is willing challenge the well-established Multinational Corporations by shortening the time to market of their ICT investments. IDC expects Emerging Asian Enterprises to drive a “new wave” of ICT spend in 2012, as they look to invest in disruptive IT, such as mobility, cloud, analytics and social media.

2. The Value of 1: Asian Businesses Appreciate the Value of Singularity in IT Offerings
Following the success of some companies like Apple who focus on the simplicity of their offerings, IDC expects many ICT companies in Asia to consider this “singular” model in 2012 and simplify their portfolio.

3. Making 2 + 2 = 1: Cloud Service Orchestration Services Lead the Drive to Outsourcing 3.0
IDC forecasts that the growth of cloud-computing will create new challenges for the operators as they will have to manage a larger number of services and vendors and focus on orchestrating them.

4. The Chief Data Scientist will make “Big Data” Relevant to the Business
2012 should be the year where Data Analysis of high volumes of social interactions, real-time feeds and geostpatial information will be included in Asian businesses strategies. This will lead to the creation of “Chief Data Scientist” in major companies of the region.

5. New Cloud Workloads will Emerge: Leading with Automation
In 2012, IDC expects that as IT looks to adapt to the changing business demands in the light of the current economic uncertainty, the ability to quickly provision IT capabilities and resources will become a key differentiator in the market. It will become increasingly important to standardize and automate IT processes and that automation will be a key focus point for CIOs.

6. The Apps Aggregator: Telco’s Innovation Scout Team to Deliver Connected Homes and Hotspots
Telcos have a chance to monetize the multiplicity of applications and contents now available by aggregating them in user-centric solutions. This will require them to setup “scout teams” to identify which are the important content and applications to deliver to the customer.

7. Predictable Failure will Become a Strategic Platform Choice
IDC expect a shift in the way companies handle their systems availability, going from a redundancy approach towards the margin of error provided by virtualization solutions.

8. Companies will Return to Customer-Centric IT
Due to the uncertain economic outlook, IDC expects “customer-centricity” to be on the top of the agenda for companies in Asia/Pacific in 2012, together with a focus on technologies that help companies increase customer focus, customer engagement, and increase their knowledge of those customers who contribute the most to their business.

9. The Fusion of Mobile and IT will Pave the Way for a New Workspace
IDC expects 2012 to see a change in the way companies architecture their workspace, integrating early on the idea of mobility and cloud and data services.

10. Becoming “Middleclass”: Sub-US$100 Smartphones Will Deliver New Revenue Streams
Shipments of smartphones is expected to surpass shipments of PCs in APEJ in 2012, and the trend is not likely to be reversed. As a consequence, IDC experts see the introduction of cheaper smartphones as a great opportunity of growth in the region.

Most of these predictions are based on the idea that Asia Pacific will follow the ICT trends already observed in more mature economies. However, some specificities of the region appear, such as the emergence of a new profile of companies, and their evolution will be very interesting to follow.

We are proud to announce that Real Move, a subsidiary of True Corporation, has once more rewarded our expertise and reliability by selecting us as a third party consultant. As such, CPIT is responsible for the methodology, design and implementation of the whole Provisioning platform acceptance for True Move H new 3G network.

This platform, provided by Comptel, is critical for the operations and development of the network as it is the central node of the operators’ system through which the multiple elements of the network are prepared and configured in order to provide the services users subscribed to.

In the 3G market, it is becoming crucial for Mobile operators to manage efficiently their VAS and Content Services portfolio. Operators have to offer attractive services to monetize their 3G networks.

CPIT platform allows Operators to work hand in hand with their Content Providers and therefore easily deliver value Content Services to customers. With an immediate impact on ARPU the platform’s ROI is guaranteed within a few months.

From convergent offer definition to service management and customer follow-up, Allyo platform by CPIT perfectly suits any need and smoothly adapt to operator’s requirements.

The overall ergonomy and the technical framework relying on the latest market standards (full graphic interface, Java, RDBMS, n-tier architecture) ensure an easy implementation and a complete operational performance for the end-users.

While this year 2011 has yet again demonstrated that natural disaster are unavoidable, it also has shown that technology can help us mitigate the consequences by improving prevention, rescue and recovery efforts.

By combining the power of GIS and the tremendous amount of data now available across the government, the private sector or even the Internet, Galigeo G11 location intelligence solution is of great help before, during and after such emergency situation.

Its ability to connect easily to multiple sources and aggregate the data in an infinite way to users ranging from the general public to the most trained expert make it a versatile and powerful solution for disaster management and recovery.

Mobile Advertising is outpacing online advertising

According to several reports released recently, Mobile advertising is starting to take up a much larger portion of digital marketing campaigns. Spending in the mobile advertising space will be approximately $4 billion worldwide this year. And a 50 percent increase in mobile ads in North America was observed in less than three months.

According to a survey by Millward Brown’s Dynamic Logic, mobile ad awareness is potentially far higher than traditional advertising.

What about mobile operators?

Consumers are now using mobile devices to surf the Internet pretty much like they use computers. If operators do not succeed in building real differentiated services fast enough, they will reduce their role to that of “bit pipe” delivery networks.

But operators are sitting on a gold mine of subscriber data: socio- demographics, consumption habits and behavior, geo-localization, type of mobile device, etc. They should try to make the best out of it: First, operators will have to evaluate and integrate the data, which is typically spread across numerous different systems. Then, they will have to implement the data-mining capabilities that will allow them to provide marketers with predictive information on customer behavior and give them the ability to target specific customer segments.

Their next advantage could also come from combining multichannel advertising platforms. The ability to integrate mobile advertising with other channels, such as fixed Internet and TV (e.g., IPTV), could be instrumental in designing complete advertising campaigns. For operators that own several channels, cross-channel advertising is a competitive advantage in the battle with Internet players.

Finally, they could extend services to include mobile payments. Telecommunications operators can offer subscribers the ability to purchase items through their mobile devices, paying through their mobile accounts without providing sensitive personal information via the Web. Mobile payment technologies aren’t mature yet, and there is still some space for the Operators here.

Mobile advertising is a train that operators cannot afford to miss. It is critical for them to take advantage of their relationship and knowledge of their customers. Will they be able to take this opportunity?

Earlier this year we reported about the growing trend of mobile payments on 2011.
Now that more than half a year has passed, it is clear that the battle has started and the next few months will be critical for the future of mobile payments. The technology is getting popular, with many new mobile phone models now equipped by default with NFC technology.

But the innovation is not only on the customer side. Vendors can now use mobile devices and networks to accept payments. First was Square. Their very simple solution of mobile payment lets almost anyone with an iPhone or Adroid device accept credit card payments at a very competitive price, relying on their internet connectivity to securely process the payment.

Soon, competitors appeared. Erply, which specializes in cloud-based point-of-sale solutions for mobile devices as well as desktops and laptops, has unveiled a new mobile credit card reader for handheld mobile devices.
Touted for both small and large businesses, the Erply card reader is designed to support traditional credit card processing as well as near field communications (NFC) technology.

And not later than last month, Intuit Inc. and Verizon Wireless on Thursday announced that Intuit’s GoPayment mobile application and reader are now available in Verizon Wireless’s 2,300 U.S. stores.
Intuit is another service of mobile payment, similar to Square and Erply.

As carriers seek to sell more services to small businesses, they’re increasingly seeing the value of offering payment applications with smart phones, according to mobile-payments consultant Todd Ablowitz, president of Centennial, Colo.-based Double Diamond Group. “Clearly what this says more than anything else is that carriers that can reach merchants and casual merchants are recognizing the value of payment acceptance,” he says.
“Payments and transactions are often the biggest hurdle businesses face,” Mike Schaefer, executive director of the Business Solutions Group for Verizon Wireless, said in a news release. “Our value proposition is to streamline, simplify, and enable business owners to get paid with minimal delay.”

Those who feel left out in this race are the Banks. It probably won’t be very long before they come up with an answer to these new competitors.

One of the lessons of the Arab Spring of 2011 was that communication networks, and especially mobile and internet, are now at the center of the expression of freedom by the population. However, these networks need to be operated, and in the wide majority of the case, they are controlled either by governmental agencies or private corporations whose objectives might differ.

There are every day more projects and technologies that aim at taking back this control form the operators.

Among those, The New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative (OTI) proposes to build a new type of tool for democratic organizing. The project would combine well-known projects — such as the open source voice projects Asterisk and OpenBTS – with new projects for mesh networking known as The Serval Project and Commotion to enable routers to create an open mesh network.

The combination of these projects is quite compelling. Each brings an additional level of control over the privacy or the network itself.
Commotion is one of the projects attracting the most attention. It is a fairly new project that seeks to make distributed communications easier by turning any device from a phone to a router into a node on a mesh network. The Commotion site says:

Our first hope is first create an intranet as requested from our growing contacts on the ground to facilitate the creation of local based organizing and outreach intranet applications

Using OpenBTS linked to an open-source voice server running software such as Asterisk, a distributed network now has the ability to make voice calls without going back to the centralized core network of a wireless or wireline carrier. If one hooks a server running OpenBTS to an Asterisk server on a Commotion network, then voice calls via VoIP are now available via the existing GSM radios on the phones.

Today, Serval just released a developper version of his App on google’s Android Market. Making the creation of real wide-sized mesh network closer from reality than ever.

While this sounds like very good news for journalists and activists working under totalitarian regimes, it also should be considered seriously by Network operators as it provides alternatives to an audience that was, until now, captive.