Primary-1 Schools, Bus arrival times, Smart Watches, Trackers and paying for Data SIM.

Happy new year & Happy Re-opening of schools.

With the schools beginning, it's happy & sad feeling. Your little ones are all grown up to enter in Primary-1 but at the same time looking at Singapore primary school system, and the super long hours you end up having sleep fewer nights.

The schedule from the school & Bus as follows:

• 06:20 --> Bus pickup
• 07:30 --> School start time
• 13:30 --> School end time
• 14:30 --> Bus drop off.

Now one can see almost 2+ hours wasted in transport and making the "school" almost 8 hours which is a typical adult work duration. 

Did I say the school is 2 km from my home? 

Anyway, the wastage is due to the kiasi mentality of us and doubt I can change this anytime soon. But will continue.

Trying to solve one major issue which is the bus arrival time (in the first two days it's between 13:45 to 15:20). So ended up buying a smartwatch with 3G capabilities.

For the SIM card, what we need is a simple Data SIM with >1GB/Mo volume and doesn't need any fancy stuff. 

After comparing postpaid SIM only contract plans, MultiSIM options and prepaid I ended up going for M1.

My criteria is simple. Lowest possible $/Month

M1 Prepaid card costs $15 to buy and comes with 2GB data valid for 120 days. That's ~ $4/month

This is a one-time cost and that can easily cover first 3-4 months to give the tracker a try.

For the monthly recurring cost, I am thinking of two options. One is to go with a 300MB topup which costs $5/Month of simply get a new SIM card :)

30-Day Data Packs
300MB	$5
1GB	$10
2GB NEW + 30-Day Free Incoming Call!	$14
4GB NEW + 30-Day Free Incoming Call!	$21
6GB NEW + 30-Day Free Incoming Call!	$28

I wish, TPG telecom or some new TELCO can come up with plans as "add-ons" to enable multiple SIM cards for tracking purposes. Be it Kids or Elderly or simply a tracker..

Mobile Internet Data Costs across region... Brunei is most affordable, India is on the other end

Source: Tech In Asia, Socialmeediaweek.org

According to above sources, the most affordable mobile internet is in Brunei, followed by Singapore while the most expensive are Timor, India, Philippines.

I think the study is good but if possible there should be some points need to be considered. Especially the bottom of pyramid folks who occupy the bottom half or more in India, timor etc. If we focus on Mobile Data subscribers that would be a good measurement.

i.e. Take the sample and calculations from those who subscribe to Mobile Data. In that case there would be a huge different IMHO.

I am sure Indonesia, Thailand would be more 'affordable'. 

The new drama about quality in Indian mobile space

Source: multiple (IBN, LR, COAI & TRAI..)


It is a known fact that most of the things in India are about Quantity rather than quality. I wouldn't blame anyone but it is more of cultural thing. People tend to talk 'big' things and 'large' stuff. So same way the telcom industry started to fight for numbers, and what they ignored is the 'quality' aspect. So while I can't tell if India offers the cheapest rates I can certainly tell that India offers the worst quality in emerging markets. Be it the voice quality (half codec), or Data (be it 4G, 3G, 2G or whatever), or consistent experience or billing.

So recently there is a fight between regulatory bodies and operators about Dropped Calls. Based on some surveys the DCR is > 12% vs Allowed rate of <3%. By the way did I mentioned that majority of nations follow a DCR of < 1% ? Singapore operators CDR/DCR is approx 0.3 (Source. IDA). Before one jump on to say that Singapore is a small country, I need to share that Singapore is far more complex than many large nations. The coverage quality, dense urban environment, and volume makes it far more complex.

Having said that, I must say the biggest problem in Indian industry is the basic infra. Be it the continuos power supply, fibre connectivity to the base station, quality labour and management.

• Power: I better stop talking about as this is pretty common and known to the world. India has been talking about exponential growth in power production for the last twenty years. It will be the same even after 20 years (yeah, am a pessimist when it comes to some topics)

• Fibre connectivity: Biggest problem with this is the chaotic situation at the ground. Who owns the duct or drainage or street poles in India. Everyone with a mouth and shoulder power. So the TELCO may get permission from the state government, but the local municipal / corporation authorities may well reject and cut the fibre. Or vice versa. Or even worse, the Corporation may approve but another department from the corporation may cut it off. During one of my recent meeting with a large operator, I was told that on average there are  8 intentional fibre cuts in a day in New Delhi alone. That's a huge issues.
• Lastly the people who became less pragmatic. Very subjective topic to open but as long as the operators/leadership focusses on short term benefits and run the business as a profit generating machine without strong engineering/fundamental skills within, it is going to be a tough ride.

As long as the fundamental problems are not addressed, this issue going to be there for a long time. Hopefully either TRAI or GOV bodies will come up with some guidelines on duct usage (or passive infrastructure provisioning). 

M1 Fiber Broadband 200 Mbps + Mobile Broadband 1 GB Promo @ SGD 39

It's time to re-contracted my home Fiber broadband. It's not a great comparison work for me (you might have guesses which camp I went for as I shared few times in the past about my experiences here, here & here) and I tried to get the cheapest among big telco's. Again, M1 is attractive and lately I am quite impressed with the improvement in Customer Service. I had a very bad experience with their call centre but now a days it's a matter of seconds(or less than couple of min) before some one attends the call.

So the offer is 200 Mbps home fiber, 1GB mobile broadband, free digital voice for home landline & a Linksys free Wi-Fi router. All at SGD 39 per month.

It was great and I signed up over telephone / online for this two days ago. Opennet is still a pain in the XYZ, as the earliest appointment is in early July. Anyway, I've got the free router and data SIM delivered to me. So I tried to check whether the data SIM is working fine, and I tried it in my 2nd Dual-SIM Phone.

Now the funniest part. The moment I restarted the phone, I've got a call from a telemarketer from Prudential.  I've no idea how the hell they even know this number. I havent even checked the number as I thought it's a data SIM. So I checked and found the number on SIM card cover, then I tried to make a call. Yeah it works surprisingly. Seems M1 didn't blocked it unlike SingTel.

Which means, you can use this as a 2nd mobile line or spare mobile line ? But there is a caveat. The charges are damn expensive. According to M1 the voice calls & SMS are charged for both incoming & outgoing. Below are the rates.

Local Airtime Charges (Excluding Mobile Broadband V plans)

Peak Hours (Mon - Sat, 9am - 9pm) 1st min. at 21.4¢, 2nd min. onwards at 10.7¢ Off-Peak Hours (Sun, Public Holidays, Mon - Sat, 9pm - 9am) 5.35¢ per min Charged by 1st min. block, followed by 6 sec. block

For me, it's good and bad. I can pass this SIM card when my close friends travel to Singapore, or use it as spare.
But to be honest, I found the danger of getting anonymous incoming calls worse than the benfit. So that's where I called m1 to block or bar the voice calls completely. Be it incoming/outgoing. I can still use this for Data and my trusted VoIP softwares like Fringe, GV or the all time fav Skype would be enough. Who needs a CS connectivity :)

Now looking forward for the Fiber connectivity to home. Will update in next couple of weeks time :)

Singapore Mobile operators go for Tiered pricing. Both SingTel & StarHub slashes data volume by greater than 90%

Source: CNA

Good news to Telco's & Employees/Engineers working there. But bad news to end users.

Yesterday SingTel announced the new plans for LTE and at the same time announced that they would be reducing the 12 GB limit to 2GB. Within minutes StarHub followed suite and in a more aggressive manner they slashed to 1GB.

This means all you can do with the mobile price plan on SH is watching around 8 hours of Youtube (My observation here) in a month or 40 min / work day of youtube.

No more downloads/videos/streaming on mobile. Ok, no more complaining and as a consumer, now I want few things from SingTel/StarHub.

1. Reduce the prices 


Based on SingTel price plans, a basic plan with 100 min voice min is priced at $25.68/month
at the same time based on current plans the 12GB data with 100 min is priced at $39.90/month
So the current charges are estimated as ~ $14/month for 12 GB.

Now I don't expect them to charge based on the same but based on SingTel pricing itself they intend to charge $5.35/GB. If I apply the same principle, then we shouldn't be paying $14 but $10.70. But I am not optimistic as the market is kind of fixed in Singapore and without real competition all the operators simply price in the same ranges.

2. Improve Coverage, Speeds

I'm sure majority of the people have noticed that lately the mobile coverage/speed in Singapore sucks. I travel quite frequently in the region so I carry the local SIM cards. To my surprise even the developing nations (India, Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia) offers much better voice clarity & data speed compared to Singapore. In Australia Optus offers $2 / day package where you can enjoy unlimited voice/data/sms by simply paying $2 a day (info here).

By the way, recently Google study made it official that Singapore offers one of the slowest mobile speeds among developed nations. Now Operators can't give an excuse that they can't go on expanding spree forever because users are using data without paying for.

3. Service


Not really related to tiered pricing or buffet pricing but in general I believe this is high time that Operators need to improve on service levels and treat customers as 'humans'. When we try to reach out to technical support it is common to wait a min of 20-30 min in Q listening to a boring music. The same operator can reach us any time and blast SMS advertisements at middle of night.

IDA as regulator should come in here and stipulate certain SLA/SLG. Not the typical 'paper' SLA but real experience.

In summary I don't mind paying if I am getting the quality, reliability & service.

Airtel prepaid validity - An intriguing question

More than 90% of Indians use Prepaid mobile phones. So it is very common for people to simply purchase a SIM card with INR 100 (~ $ 2) and throw it off after a week. (By the way on a separate note these kinda experiences and unmatching financials shows why I don't believe the 100 mil subscriber numbers by Bharti, RIL etc)

The problem I am having is keeping a number permanently (or atleast for few years) so my banking systems, train reservation systems & other online systems doesn't have to be updated every few months. I've tried all the options other than subscribing to a post paid (which is not very cheap or 'doesnt offer value to me')

1. Airtel Customer care told me that the "sim" validity is typically 35 or 40 years (?) and you can check with *123# USSD code. However the 'main' account has a validity period of 2 months so if you don't use or make any calls within the 2 months your number with remaining balance is gone
2. Online forums says one year validity; 45 days validity; 
3. The salesman at Airtel store told me that it's 90 days. So every 3 months I've to recharge with minimum RC card 

My experiences're quite diff. 

1. I've a SIM card with "0" balance which is not dead even it's 2 years old.
2. I've a new SIM card with 300 balance (supposed to be) but dead within 1 month
3. I've a 3G data card which is dead within one week after I utilized the complete data.

Conclusion: Anything can happen in India. So go for a post-paid if you want to avoid the hassle. If not follow the crowd. Don't expect Airtel (or other telecom) to offer 'service'. It sucks and they charge per minute basis :)

Mobile Turbo Boost - Is it a real "Use Case" ?

I've seen many of the mobile vendors talking about "Turbo Boost" as a use case to entice operators to purchase their products.

So the idea is a subscriber gets choppy video and when he purchases  turbo boost by paying extra money the bandwidth is updated on the fly and Customer will experience good quality video.

The way I see it is this is one of the absurd idea of a monetization stream. Just imagine you are paying $X for your cable operator but you are getting choppy video. Imagine your Operator asking "extra money" whenever you want to get a "good quality video". Would you still continue with the service ?

This is exactly the same situation. If Operator is 'improving' the video quality then I can understand the 'premium'. But for offering 'basic' video why would subscriber pay ?

I saw Cisco, Ericsson, NSN preaching the usecases to justify their Policy/GW solution. Weird enough they even have 'survey results' to show that Operators want "turbo boost" as one of the differentiatior.

Well, if I see the service in any operator portfolio, I wouldn't even subscribe to their services. I simply need a 'basic' service which works

*http://www.slideshare.net/CiscoSP360/heavy-reading-mobile-operator-perspectives-monetization-optimization-and-video?from=ss_embed

Non Camera Phones - Secured Office

I am trying to find mobile phones (preferably smart phones) without camera but I am quite surprised that I couldn't find any in the market right now.
There are a couple of smartphones but they are running windows 6.1 (HTC Snap & Fuze) and one from Blackberry.
Seems like the best bet is to go for ipad v1 & use VoIP :)

So my plan is to subscribe to MIO MOBILE and use the soft client on iPad for incoming and outgoing calls. Let me see how it goes.

Top 1% of Mobile Users Consume Half of World’s Bandwidth (NY Times Report)

Source: NYTimes

Here is an interesting article about the usage patterns

The world’s congested mobile airwaves are being divided in a lopsided manner, with 1 percent of consumers generating half of all traffic. The top 10 percent of users, meanwhile, are consuming 90 percent of wireless bandwidth.

Part of the reason for the increase in download volumes may be Apple’s Siri voice feature on the iPhone 4S, Mr. Flanagan said. Siri allows consumers to dictate to the phone and enter more text and data into the network in an easier way.     

I don't really agree with the above explanation. Rather what I see is the 'video' and 'cloud' driving the usage. For example if a user makes 10 SIRI queries it'd use approximately .5MB data. On the other hand if a person takes a picture and syncs to cloud (dropbox or other such services) it'd use 2MB+ of data.
Similarly if a person watches 5 minutes of youtube HD during his commute it'd incur more than 10MB data.

Coupled with the background applications the actual number of calls are multiplied and the end result is 10% of users consuming 90% wireless bandwidth or signalling space. Data usage is still 30-70 or 20-80 depending on the country/location. For example in Singapore its 20-80 and in Indonesia 40-60(telkomsel analysis).

I am not a great fan of "policy" or throttling as user will always find newer avenues to overcome the network based limitations. So the answer I've is the 'volume' based charging rather than 'unlimited' plans. Let the end user decide on how much he wants to pay rather than operator meddling with experience.

Prepaid mobile plan in Australia for travelers

When I travel most of the times I tend to use Wi-Fi but some times you need to rely on roaming and that single usage can make you poorer by few $. Couple of hours ago I landed in Sydney and Thanks for the lesson learned in India,  I explored whether I can purchase a prepaid SIM for Data. To my surprise Optus is offering a fantastic deal which is 2$ a day deal. So it goes like for AUD 2 you'll get unlimited data, voice & SMS (voice & SMS in Australia only). This is much cheaper compared to any roaming subscription or bridge subscription.
Ofcourse the inconvinience of using 2 mobile phones is there but who cares. I always carry two phones for biz & personal purposes. All I need to do is swap my SIM cards

There are total 3 mobile stores in Sydney airport (2 from Optus + 1 from Vodafone). In total I paid AUD12 for 5 days unlimited data. By the way I am not naive to believe it's 'real' unlimited but a speed throttled plan but as long as it serves my purpose of push mail, occasional VoIP, Skype, Googel Voice and Maps, Facebook that's more than enough.

A good website comparing various plans
http://prepaidplans.com.au/2009/05/quicksearch-prepaid-broadband/#Sim%20Only

Boostmobile, amaysim all are MVNOs and offers monthly packs. If you intend to stay for longer period or frequently visit the country then you may subscribe to monthly plans.

SingTel Mobile offers priority pass service - Asia's First.

Source: SingTel

As per singtel claim, the service offers better speeds( i.e. Typical speeds of 1.7 Mbps to 4.8 Mbps on a 21Mbps subscriber 80% of the times).

The cache is the 80% and whether is it on a single session or multiple sessions. I'll certainly exclude the option of asking for overseas content as the control is not within singtel hands. If they can promise the specified speeds even for a single session that'd be great.

Technically speaking the issue here is not with the limitations of technology or radio stuff, but how much money the operators are willing to spend and how much money consumers are willing to pay. Today, without doubt the problem is congestion and resource availability. Be it singtel or starhub or m1, all the networks are congested and running at high loads during peak hours. So the choice for them is to expand the network and charge the customer or persuade heavy users to offload. Challenge is the unique situation in Singapore, where mobile internet access is almost used as a replacement of fixed broadband. So offloading can be tricky.

Then, what are the alternatives?. IMO, I'd strongly suggest the Femtocell or other seamless/tightly coupled offloading solutions like i-wlan or GAN/E-GAN. Singtel can leverage on the NG-NBN and offer combo deals or packages for in-house usage. For outdoor usage, they can leverage on micro coverage/hot spots, something which is gaining lots of traction in LTE space.

Another point is the premium pass or ERP option is offered only on Dongles but for smartphones. I'd think the issue for them is the 'quantity' of smartphone on higher plans. If singtel offers on smartphones, this will be challenging for them to differentiate. If they put too high charge, people might not subscribe in quantities and those subscribed will complain like hell when they don't get the speeds. If they put too low, then end up like current situation of our express ways where ERP end up collecting money points rather than offering faster access.

Overall, not very convinced that the 'premium pass' can solve the throughput issues. It is more of adding capacity and offering at the right price point or offload to fixed network.

Who killed Nokia...

After last week gossip that Microsoft may be looking to acquire Nokia, today the latest rumor says Samsung may be considering Nokia.
Also the credit ratings of Nokia downgraded just a notch above Junk. What happened to the darling of mobile industry? A lot of European companies/people/leaders looked at Nokia as Europe answer to Silicon valley's innovation. Now why Nokia couldn't transform itself like what it did in the past. Lots of questions..

1. Is it Apple who killed Nokia?

I'd say up to some extent yes. Before Apple, the smart phone market was enjoyed by Nokia. When people talk about Mobile OS, it is Symbian. Apps are Symbian apps and Nokia phones are the standard. But with iPhone the marketplace changed overnight. Everyone started to launch new smart phones with bigger screens. Google released Android, Apps became the 'in' thing. But why Nokia couldn't/didn't saw the change coming?

2. Is it the strategy?

I wouldn't comment much here as I can sense the lack of strategy from Nokia after the mgmt changes. I don't think any big company would clearly state that their strategy is to 'partner' with another company :|
Anyway in early days the problem was with the lack of focus. They started symbian, then the number of symbian series/versions were too many. For different purposes they've started different series. (like 60, 80, N, UI etc). I'm sure this would've created a big havoc in their R&D. The development path was pretty slow too.

On the handset front, I still like their handset for intuitive design. What they've missed is the change in physical layer. i.e new networks offering higher data speeds and markets going from traditional WAP to plain internet. If we see in emerging markets like India, Africa, Nokia is still the market leader with considerable gap above No.2 player. But in more matured markets, their pie dropped like hell.

If we look in to their income statement, you can clearly see the problem. It is as simple as this. Their sales dropped tremendously from 2008 (74Billion in 2007, 70Billion in 2008, 58Billion in 2009 & ~57Billion in 2010). When the trend is clear I don't really understand what the management thinking. Are they simply counting on emerging markets to compensate for the dev market drops? Anyway the sales of smartphones is the culprit here.

3. Is it Microsoft/Partnership

I'd still say this is their biggest mistake strategically. There is no synergy between these two players as well as no clear benefits in the long run. When Nokia became submissive to MS, a lot of staunch supporters of Symbian/nokia changed their loyalties. Financially the details are still not publicly available but I've confidence in MS management that thay must have gotten a very good offer :)

To summarize, I'd think it is the management/strategy which affected Nokia. Given the current situation I am extremely pessimistic about their Mobile operations. However their Mobile Networks & other new areas (they've started going aggressively in to IT market with cloud offerings and other service offerings) they may able to make some profits. But the increase is not going to compensate the losses in mobile business. Hopefully they'll be able to turnaround. Afterall most of us started our mobile journey with a "nokia" phone.

SK Telecom goes for Femto Cell

Source: Light Reading

SK Telecom opted for Femto to manage the exponential growth of mobile data. Barring city states like Singapore, Hongkong, I think most of the Mobile operators will go in the same way as Femto offers a seamless way for end sub.

For the offload, there are various means. Below is a basic setup of mobile network.

[Mobile]--------{Radio network}---------{Core Network}----------{Internet}

If we see, Femto comes in the extreme right hand side. This has a huge positive impact on the Customer experience. i.e. Customer doesn't even have to worry about the technology and he can continue using mobile data.

If we take Wi-Fi offload this is quite similar to Femto, but the key difference is Customer need to activate Wi-Fi and from Operator point of view the traffic may not even reach his network. If the operator is an integrated operator, then perhaps the network can be setup in such a way so that the wi-fi traffic will be routed to mobile data center or network.

For other options like TCP compression, Video compression I am not a great fan of them as these were created during the early days when any home page with size more than 100KB considered bad web design.

I wish to share a detailed analysis if my time permits. Hopefully in the next couple of months..

Mobile Phones "MAY" heighten the risk of Cancer. India & TRAI, hope you are listening..

Source: e-week

WHO issued a warning on heightened risk of Cancer associated with high mobile usage. As usual, mobile companies & vendors started replying quickly. If you see the reply you know what is the truth,

CTIA (This is the association of mobile folks) says, that "there was still no solid evidence that cell phones cause cancer".

Now, read the statement and it says a lot. What CTIA says is that they are not confirming or providing evidence to show that mobile phone usage doesn't cause cancer but they says "no solid evidence".

The mobile phone manufacturers claim in their manuals that the goods are safe. If you read them carefully, you'll know how safe are they :) . Just look in to the manual and search for SAR info.

The Apple iPhone 4 safety manual says users' radiation exposure should not exceed FCC guidelines: "When using iPhone near your body for voice calls or for wireless data transmission over a cellular network, keep iPhone at least 15 millimeters (5/8 inch) away from the body."

BlackBerry Bold advises users to "keep the BlackBerry device at least 0.98 inch (25 millimeters) from your body when the BlackBerry device is transmitting."

The biggest culprits are the Mobile phone companies. In developed world they comply to regulations but the developing world, they are doing a great harm. Places like India, Indonesia, where the regulation is not so tight, these firms are notorious for transmitting at very high levels. If you happen to stay near the base station, you'll know and you can literally feel it. 3G in particular is really bad and the exponential growth in 3G in India might potentially crate more issues.

It is really sad to see that communication which is critical to human development causing problems to the health. Hope, that there will be more research & drive to reduce the RF congestion around.

The most important improvement needed for next generation mobile phones/mobility devices..

I don't really wish for a dual core or quad core processor; memory is not a big deal too. Even the speed of wireless broad band is not an game changer. I am quite happy with ~ 2 Mbps speed which I managed to get most of the times on a 21Mbps HSPA+ network.

My biggest hope is to have a new gen "battery". A battery which can last until I've time to charge. I've been using Android devices and recently got an iPhone (Company phone). iPhone batter is much better compared to HTC Deside or Samsung Galaxy S. But still after extensive use the battery dropped to <30% in less than a day.

I am a mobile worker means all my tools, gadgets are in a bag and I'll carry them with me. My notebook is a lenovo X201 and it gives me approx 3 hours battery time. With a extended battery pack I can squeeze another couple of hours. I wish I could get at least 8 hours time so I don't have to carry power supply/cables in the back pack.

Most basic item it seems, but somehow this is where the innovation seems to be missing/pending..

UK ISP's & TELCO's release a CoP for industry.

Just realized that the service providers released a Code of Practice (CoP) on traffic management transparency of broadband services. The full paper can be downloaded from here.

I've mentioned about net neutrality in Singapore & Operator responses  here. This is after IDA request them for information/submissions. The UK CoP is voluntary and supported by service providers; BSkyB, BT, O2, TalkTalk, Three, Virgin Media and Vodafone – these service providers account for 90% of all fixed-line broadband customers and 60% of all mobile customers in the UK. The group's first priority is to publish a common Key Factor Indicator table (KFI), summarizing the traffic management practices by June 2011.

The mobile operators T-Mobile & Orange didn't participate and I believe they'll share their policy on traffic management soon.

The principles of CoP are below.


*Firstly an  explicit  commitment  to  provide  more  information  to  consumers  about  what practices are used in networks to (a) help maximise capacity for everyone’s benefit and (b) to support adherence by customers to terms and conditions


* Secondly, an agreed set of good practice principles that will inform how ISPs communicate 
that  information  to  consumers.    Signatories  agree  that  the  information  they  provide  about 
traffic management to their current and prospective customers will be: 
Understandable, Appropriate , Accessible , Current , Comparable , Verifiable 

* Thirdly,  to  deliver  on  the  comparability  principle,  signatories  commit  to  publishing  a 
consistent  Key  Facts  Indicator  (KFI)  table,  summarising  the  traffic  management  practices 
they use for each broadband product they currently market. 

CoP on implementing Traffic management.

* To manage the overall network  - Prioritize/deprioritize time-critical applications (e.g. video streaming)
* In relation to Customer's contract - Data Caps, or As per T&C's of the contract

The actual means of implementation is not shared but I am sure it's by using DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) tools (e.g. Cisco-SCE8000, Allot, Sandvine, Arbor, Procera, & lot more Mobile vendors). However DPI tools does have their own limitation and tend to generate lot of false positives. For example a simple SSL tunnel (If you use HTTPS instead of HTTP) cannot be inspected, so if P2P uses tunneling or VPN or TOR kind of networks, the DPI's are not very useful.

Vodafone Hutchison Australia (VHA) replacing their RAN with Huawei

Source: telecoms.com

Interesting to see VHA replacing their RAN network. Also Optus is working with NSN & Huawei and if they choose NSN,  then it's became a testing ground for the three largest telecom vendors in australia (Telstra is with Ericsson). VHA didn't specify what was the root cause or actual case behind the dropped calls, delayed sms & voice mails, slow data speeds and long waits to customer care :) but I don't think the problem is completely with the radio network. It was working pretty well until middle of last year and during the second half the performance drop became pretty obvious.

Most of the carriers I've seen had the problems during the early days of HS launches. This is due to various reasons but main culprit is the optimization and configuration. So hopefully VHA managed to find the root cause and they are addressing it by replacing their RAN.

 By the way I am not a radio expert so the comments about radio are based on my conversation with radio experts rather than from my own experience.

VoIP, SIP - Advantage of TELCO, Mobile Operators over OTT players

For the past couple of days I am going through the RCS and other alternative technologies that can pose a challenge to traditional telco revenue. GSMA published a good document here
Then a question came in to my mind.

"What is the USP or what are the clear advantages if a TELCO or Mobile Operator choose launch a VoIP service compared to the traditional internet players like Google, Skype etc. "


Though there are traditional answers vendor propose (e.g. TELCO knows the customer, good point of contact or offer at a cheap rate or bundling service etc etc), I started to look from Customer point of view and at first i thought it's CLIP or Caller Line Identification. When I use SkypeOut or Google Voice or FringOut the receiving party cannot see my number. So if a TELCO choose to launch then they can integrate with their soft switch and pass the CLIP via SIP.

Then I realized my SkypeOut calls can be configured with CLIP which means there is a way or means to do it. So what other unique propositions an operator can propose to the Customer to opt for Operators VoIP service?

Comments or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

NFC promises - But is it going to be successful or repetition of earlier debacle

I saw the news that mobile operators committing to NFC and to launch commercial services by next year. NFC is not new and in 2007, GSM released a whitepaper on NFC. In the paper GSM outlined the activities in Europe,

* Public transport ticketing - Vodafone with Nokia, Philips semiconductors
* Public transport ticketing - Bouygues Telecom, RATP, NEC, & Gemalto
* Public transport ticketing - Teliasonera (Finland), Nokia
* M-Payment, car park subsc  - Orange, Cofignoa, Vince & Fly tag
* Stadium access, ticketing  - KPN (Netherlands), Roda JC

In addition to those we've seen several activites in this region,

* Public transport (Ezlink) - Starhub (Singapore)
* M-Payment (Nets)          - SingTel (Singapore)
* M-Payment (Fasttap)       - Maxis (Malaysia)
* M-Payment                 - AIS, Kasikornbank (Thailand)

So far we've seen commerical launches in Malaysia and the take up rate (based on my observation) is far from great. Also there is news from Korea & Japan that KDDI, Softbank & SK Telekom are working on a new service which supposed to work seamlessly between both the countries.

After reading all these stories I can only say, that NFC is coming in the big way but the actual success will be pretty much dependand on how TELCO's choose to launch the services. If TELCO's choose to compete headon with the payment card industry or financial institutions then the chances of them getting succesful will be very slim. If they choose to complement them and given the fact that majority of handphones will come with NFC, the chances of augmenting their revenue will be high. It may be small but it's better than totally be out of the value chain.

BSNL DSL, Reliance Netconnect, Bharti EDGE

Perhaps this is the first time I need to use internet extensively in India. We've BSNL DSL (One Net) connection at home but having experienced problems with it I wanted to have another option and I am inclined to get a mobile connection. With mobile I don't have to worry about power outages and landline issues.

Finally I opted for Bharti due to the price and positive feedback. Charges are acceptable and speed is much better than what I expected. I even made some skype calls over it and quality is same or much better than our world class infrastructure in Singapore. Throughout is consistent around 120 Kbps which is enough for skype.. The charges are R5 for 50MB /Day. Few more options are available like R98 for 2GB/Month etc..