Showing posts with label Cellular. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cellular. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Rais, why do we need more mobile players??

Why do we(Malaysians) get "smart" Communications Minister all the time?

This is his latest statements, taken from Bernama:
The government wants to see more players in mobile communication, particularly the mobile broadband industry, Information Communication and Culture Minister Datuk Seri Dr Rais Yatim said.

He urged the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) to give priority to licence application by small and medium enterprises (SME) wanting to venture into mobile communication.
Let's look at what we have NOW. We have three 2G operators, four 3G operators, five MVNOs(including Baraka), four WiMAX operators and a bunch of other wireless ISPs including Izzinet. Out of all these, THIS IS A SMALL MARKET! Malaysia has a cellular phone penetration of 106 percent, that's more than 29 million of mobile numbers.
I am asking this AGAIN, why do we need more mobile operators?


Dear Minister, for your knowledge Malaysians need more applications and content ON THE PHONE. Educate them on the benefit of mobile services and how to use applications on the phone. For this to happen, the telcos need to open up their network, let CONTENT DEVELOPERS meet the MOBILE USERS, we don't need "middle man" (mobile operators).

Unless the Government needs another mobile player so they can tax them and charge them a high fee for the licenses, I don't see a need for another mobile player in the market.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Opinion: Mobile Operators charging way too much

The Government needs to urgently look into the high charges by mobile telcos for local calls made on mobile phones.

It has now come to a point where calls made to overseas destinations can be cheaper than those made locally. A mobile phone call is also about four times more expensive than those made using the fixed line or the public phone.

How is it that overseas calls are cheaper than those made to local destinations just a couple of kilometres away? How is it that the fixed line is much cheaper than mobile links?

Today, the frequent refrain of almost every prepaid user is that one has little or no credit and that one needs to top up constantly. The credit is gone in a jiffy. Mobile phone calls today take a big slice of one’s personal expenditure.

The most exploited appear to be the young who use their pocket money to buy prepaid cards. The poor youngsters are totally exploited to the hilt by the mobile telcos with alluring advertisements that blind them to reality.

All kinds of attractive advertisements in various media, especially directed towards the young, are to be found everywhere with the intention of making people connect and communicate. But the cost is high.

The chatty younger generation are the main and easy target of the telcos who eye their disposable incomes. This could be one reason for charges being high in the country.

The Government needs to investigate why local mobile phone charges are higher than in less developed countries. In India, for example, rates are extremely low because of a price war amid healthy competition.

Here the various mobile telcos, instead of being in competition with one another, have established a cartel to maintain the monopoly and the status quo, exploiting the captive phone user who has no other option.

The profit level of each of the mobile telcos is more than RM1.5bil annually, a level of profit usually associated with financial institutions and petroleum companies. Need there be a better illustration than these figure to show that the telcos are charging exorbitant rates compared to their costs and investments.

It is also time that the MCMC became proactive and not wait for complaints about telcos. All mobile telcos should charge a uniform rate no matter which network is used as the differences are unjustified considering that Malaysia is a small country.

The charge per minute should be indicated on the display screen of the phone to better inform users. Currently, only the charge for the call is shown.

It is also time that consumers associations (CAs) took up this issue seriously as high charges for local calls are discriminatory and unjustified. With the cost of almost everything going up, the CAs need to focus on relevant issues, and not on extraneous ones for which there are other organisations to champion.

The mobile telcos would not have gone on an exploitative spree if the CAs had been more proactive and vigilant in championing the cause of the Malaysian consumer.

V. THOMAS, Sungai Buloh.

Source

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Winners of the 15th Annual Global Mobile Awards

THE 2010 GLOBAL MOBILE AWARD WINNERS:

Best Mobile Game
Winner: Iricom – The Last City – Fight For Your Life!

Best Mobile Music Service
Winner: Odyssey Music Group – Deezer

Best Mobile Advertising or Marketing
Winner: CLANMO GmbH and OgilvyOne – The IKEA PS Mobile Interior Planning Tool

Best Mobile TV Service
Winner: CBS Mobile – TV.COM

Best Mobile Location Based Advertising Campaign
Winner: R/GA – Nokia viNe

Best Mobile Enterprise Product or Service
Winner: Research In Motion – BlackBerry Enterprise Server v5.0

Best Mobile Internet Service
Winner: adaffix Gmbh – YELLIX

Best Mobile Money Service
Winner: Safaricom – M-PESA (bulk payment & utility bill) extension to service

Best Use of Mobile for Social and Economic Development
Winner: Grameen Foundation, MTN Uganda, and Google – The Grameen Foundation Application Laboratory (AppLab)

Best Mobile Money for the Unbanked Service
Winner: Zain Bahrain B.S.C – ZAP

The Green Mobile Award for Best Green Programme, Product or Initiative
Winner: VNL – VNL’s solar-powered GSM base station

Green Network Award
Winner: Mocambique Celular S.A.R.L (mcel) – Eco Naturalmente (Naturally Thinking Green)

Best Network Technology Advance
Winner: SkyCross Inc – SkyCross iMAT (isolated mode antenna technology) Antennas

Best Service Delivery Platform
Winner: Huawei Technologies Co Ltd – Huawei SDP solution

Best Billing & Customer Care Solution
Winner: Mobile TeleSystems (MTS) – You Individual Optimal Tariff Plan

Best Mobile Technology Breakthrough
Winner: Orange – Mobile High Definition (HD) Voice

Best Mobile Handset or Device
Winner: HTC – HTC Hero

Best Mobile Connected Device (non-handsets)
Winner: Novatel Wireless Inc. – MiFi Intelligent Mobile Hotspot

Government Leadership Award
Winner: Kenya

GSMA Chairman's Award
Winner: Carl-Henric Svanberg, Former CEO of Ericsson and currently Chairman BP

Mobile Industry Personality of the Year as Voted for by the Media
Winner: Steve Jobs, Co-Founder and CEO Apple

Press Release

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Maxis Network is partly DOWN

At the point of writing, there has been a number of reports that Maxis is having network problem. It is not a nationwide problem(for example only part of Ipoh is down) and appears to have started about 3-4 hours back(6pm).

Here's some screenshots from Maxis users on Twitter:
As normal, I don't think Maxis is going to apologies or notify their customers regarding this issue. By the way, their "IMPORTANT NOTICE" page was last updated in June 2009. Smooth network, am I right Maxis?


Sunday, February 14, 2010

SIMFi, WiFi hotspot on your SIM card

Some mobile phones can do Wi-Fi tethering but most just can't do it.

Sim card maker Sagem Orga and Telefonica a Spanish mobile operator will be offering "SIMFi", the first SIM card with integrated Wi-Fi targeted for mobile broadband services.

The embedded WLAN modem built into the SIM card can be controlled by the SIM toolkit applets running in the SIM, will turn the new generation USIM SIMFFi SIM card into a mobile hotspot/router that any device can connect to.

SIMFi is compatible with most existing phones.

Press Release


Another ways of creating a mobile WiFi hotspot is using a Wi-Fi Router app on a WIFi enabled phone which is currently limited to a certain brand and OS.

Sunday, February 07, 2010

DiGi 3G now in Ipoh and Kuching

DiGi's 3G service is now available in Ipoh, Perak and Kuching, Sarawak. The 3G coverage will be expanded to other towns such as Taiping, Kamunting, Kampar and Miri by the second half of 2010. It will invest RM100 million to support its expansion in both states over the next three years.

DiGi currently has more than 500,000 cumulative 3G mobile internet customers, out of which around 10% are mobile broadband customers.

The company claims to cover 30%(3G coverage) of human populated areas in Malaysia.

Saturday, January 30, 2010

500 million 3G customers worldwide

There are over 500 million 3G customers worldwide with over 300 commercially deployed UMTS networks.

About 35 of these UMTS network are HSPA+ enabled according to the UMTS forum.

The world's first LTE network was launched last month by TeliaSonera in Oslo and Stockholm. It offers speed between 20 Mbps to 80 Mbps.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Over 6k loan shark mobile phone numbers terminated

The government has traced and barred 6,163 mobile phone numbers of loan sharks or Ah Long found on numerous stickers, posters, advertisements and business cards during operations nationwide last year.

Deputy Home Minister Datuk Abu Seman Yusop said the authorities have managed to detect the persons behind the numbers and cancelled the numbers with the cooperation of the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC).

"Don’t think we cannot trace them. Our agencies have the mechanism to do that. We know who are behind the numbers and we have taken the necessary action.

"We have also asked the telecommunications providers to cancel their numbers," he told a press conference at the ministry today after chairing the meeting of the main committee on the awareness campaign against Ah Long.

Complete article on TheSun website

Thursday, December 31, 2009

GSM encryption has been hacked

A researcher called Karsten Nohl and his team claims that they have been able to break the 20 years old encryption code used in GSM(Global System for Mobile communications) networks.

The crack allows anymore with an investment as little as USD30k and some open source tools to listen to people's conversation on the GSM network.

Read the story here.

The team has published the crack online over here.

Friday, December 25, 2009

Mobile Network Status during Christmas Eve

It was the night before Christmas and you probably had problems to make a call, send an SMS or connect via mobile broadband.

There was problem with the Maxis and Celcom network, although I don't expect the Celcom network to go down till the 5th day of Christmas(Celcom has the best prepaid charging system). Surprisingly there were no reports on DiGi.

It is common that the telcos would have a standby team to handle unexpected high traffic during festive seasons. If you faced problem with your telco yesterday, in most cases it means that the network(base station) at your area was congested, or the whole network can't handle million of customers at one time.

Here's a short compilation of tweets from mobile users who were frustrated with their mobile operators between yesterday night till early this morning:

Maxis:
A number of reports on slow broadband speed or can't connect.

http://twitter.com/zaf4124/statuses/7020181246

http://twitter.com/EDyew/statuses/7024171755
http://twitter.com/myloismylife/statuses/7024234972
http://twitter.com/blee008/statuses/7026760038
http://twitter.com/imjunie/statuses/7026911360
http://twitter.com/HayatiRamli/statuses/7027667736
http://twitter.com/sapiensbryan/statuses/7029138912
http://twitter.com/AminAshaari/statuses/7002515417

Celcom:
There were reports that Celcom Broadband was slower than dial up speed(dial up speed is about 56Kbps), and a number of users can't connect. However the service recovered during noon.

http://twitter.com/Danialhamzah/statuses/6998771839
http://twitter.com/luthtextile/statuses/6999812721
http://twitter.com/nyssnisacha/statuses/7001235092
http://twitter.com/derrickveejay/statuses/7002392549
http://twitter.com/AminAshaari/statuses/7002515417

DiGi:
I tested DiGi EDGE, voice and SMS during midnight and all of it was working fine. If you did face problem with DiGi, then it was not a nationwide problem but more to a specific location.

http://twitter.com/ayiE5811/statuses/7022007400
http://twitter.com/jennihsurf/statuses/7018938945


The compilation above is just to show you the on-going network problems yesterday. There could more users out there who had problems but did not tweet about it or most probably they are not on Twitter.

Thursday, December 24, 2009

Maxis HSPA+ is too early

Just last Friday I blog that 2 of the 3G operators are HSPA+ ready, Maxis yesterday announced that small part of their network is now HSPA+ enabled. Read the official story here. In my blog post, I said that the best time to launch HSPA+ is probably about the end next year, so is Maxis making a mistake here?

But here's the thing, will this implementation resolve the current network congestion? I don't think so, using Maxis Broadband for the past few days, I still don't get a satisfying BROADband speed on HSDPA.

Let's get to point here, Maxis did not announce:
  • the availability of HSPA+ supported devices and when it will be available
  • how it selects the trial users and how long does this "trial" goes on
  • the exact date or month that HSPA+ will be officially available
  • numbers of HSPA+ enabled sites
The only thing you would notice Maxis shouting is this- We are the first to launch HSPA+!!. Sounds very supportive of its customers.
As for the experience, Maxis is promising speeds of up to 10–15Mbps, but that really depends on how much bandwidth does each of its HSPA+ base station has. Unless Maxis plan to use its own FTTH as backhaul for its base station, but this won't happen anytime soon(that's why I said end of next year).

Malaysians, go ahead and get the experience of speeds up to 21Mbps. Remember this, our current fixed line or mobile broadband(including Maxis Broadband) cannot even give you a decent and stable BROADband speed.

Will the other telco make the same move?





Friday, December 18, 2009

We are HSPA+ ready!

At least 2 of the 3G networks in this country are HSPA+ ready.

According to Wikipedia, "HSPA+ provides HSPA data rates up to 56 Mbit/s on the downlink and 22 Mbit/s on the uplink with MIMO technologies and higher order modulation (64QAM)"

Telcos just need to perform a simple software upgrade to enable HSPA+. Of course before doing that, they need to spend at least a few million to upgrade backend/backhaul and also bring in HSPA+ supported devices.

If you ask me when will this happen? Probably end of next year.


Monday, December 07, 2009

Mobile Phones don’t cause brain cancer, but ....

The latest study by Nordic researchers has found that there is no apparent link between cellphones and brain cancer.

China’s Xinhua news agency reported the finding, citing the online edition of the journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Researchers at the Institute of Cancer Epidemiology at the Danish Cancer Society in Copenhagen based their conclusion on a 30-year examination of the incidents of brain tumours in Scandinavia.

For the study, the researchers collected data on 60,000 people diagnosed with glioma and meningioma in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden between 1974 and 2003, Xinhua said.

Continue reading here

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Malaysia still not free from SMS scams

Although all of our main mobile operators(Maxis, DiGi & Celcom) has some sort of anti-spamming and anti-spoofing solution, Malaysians are still not free from scams involving SMS. There are still a number of reports that mobile users are being charged for the content or service that they did not request.

Who is supposed to take the responsibility this?
  • The Telcos?(Who has a large share on the amount of money that is billed to the mobile users)
  • The Regulator? (With current regulation that does not seem to be effective)
  • The Content Providers? (Who has access via the Telco to bill any Malaysian with a mobile number)
  • The Mobile Users? (Who place their trust on the Telco and the Regulator)
Some RM35 million was reported loss due to SMS scams in 2007 and that amount could be more today. Till this industry think of ways to properly resolve this, you can be spammed or billed for a mobile content or services that is not requested by you.

Related:

Malaysia to have 41.9 million mobile subs in 2013

The latest IEMR’s Mobile Operator Forecast report claims that Malaysia will have 41.9 million mobile subscribers in 2013 with Maxis taking subscriber market share of 41.4%.
  • Total wireless subscribers in Malaysia to reach 41.9 million in 2013
  • Given the latest quarter numbers, the publisher forecast that total subscribers in Malaysia will increase from 27.1 million in 2008 to 41.9 million in 2013.
  • The publisher’s forecasting model predicts that the numbers of subscribers at Maxis, Celcom, DiGi will reach 17.3 million(41.4%), 13.8 million(33.0%), and 10.7 million(25.6%), respectively in 2013.
  • Maxis's monthly ARPU will fall from MYR 62.75 in 2008 to MYR 53.14 in 2013. Celcom's monthly ARPU will also decline to approximately MYR 45.01 in 2013. DiGi's monthly ARPU will decline from MYR 58.89 in 2008 to MYR 52.17 in 2013.
  • EBITDA margins of Celcom and DiGi will become higher than Maxis's over the forecast period, 2009 - 2013
The 4Q09 Malaysia Mobile Operator Forecast can be purchased here.


Friday, November 13, 2009

Mobile Broadband is not for Everyone

In my opinion, the mobile Internet operators are not doing enough in educating consumers when it comes to mobile broadband.

Let me clarify.

There has been a lots of perception that 3G broadband can be compared to your Streamyx at home. Well that is totally wrong. First of all, the 3G technology was never built to replace fixed broadband service. It was built to allow faster Internet speed with light surfing on your mobile phone. Fixed line services such as Stremayx was built to handle heavy traffic such as video, heavy downloads and more.

To make their 3G investment more profitable, the 3G operators has extended the 3G Internet access for use on computers.

Who should use 3G mobile broadband?
  • Those who use WiFi in Starbucks or Coffee Bean
  • Those who require Internet access while on the move(not at home or travel frequently)
  • Those who use light Internet services such as web browsing, emails, Youtube without HD, social networking, reading online..etc
  • Not for heavy downloaders (such as P2P)
  • Those who don't use it for than 6-8 hours a day
  • Not for gamers
In my opinion, 3G mobile broadband should be used as a secondary access to your fixed line services such as Streamyx. If you are comparing your 3G mobile broadband service to Streamyx, then you are using it for the wrong reasons since 3G will also need to cater for voice services.

That is why the telcos are limiting the usage of 3G mobile broadband to control the data traffic on the network. This is expected to continue since bandwidth/backhaul/maintenance is expensive on a 3G network.

It is time that the mobile operators put in more effort to educate consumers on this matter rather than thinking of ways to sign up more broadband users and hog up the network.

You can compare Streamyx to a technology like WiMAX since WiMAX is built for Internet.

Are you the right mobile broadband user?


Saturday, September 26, 2009

Service Disruption on Celcom Network

If you were in one of the "Ini adalah Wilayah Celcom", you might had trouble in making and receiving calls using Celcom.

Muktamad! Celcom's network went down last Thursday(24 September, 09) started about 9.30am leaving more than a million Celcom users in the dark for more than 10 hours. Please read official news here.

Although Celcom claims the problem has been resolved, yet a number of users has been complaining on the 25 September 09 that they were some difficulties in making and receiving call, plus delayed SMS & slow mobile broadband.

When Celcom merged with TM Touch, the cellular unit of Telekom Malaysia in the year 2003, it lost a number of mobile users through the years. Back then Celcom was the leading telco in the country, because it had the right branding and network quality was great.

The new Celcom that we see today is different. They are at least 5 operators sharing the traffic on Celcom's GSM network(U Mobile, XOX, Tune Talk, Merchantrade, REDtone) making it the largest GSM network in the country with one of the highest traffic. The question here is, can Celcom handle these traffic? Apparently, we have seen the results for the past two days. Are they planning for more MVNOs?

Their 3G network currently has the highest traffic in the country with over 420,000 mobile broadband users and these numbers does not include normal data usage on the phone and other sources (such as the TNB Meter readers, ATMs..etc).

When a user has problems with their mobile service, the 1st thing they would do is to contact the customer service. When Celcom's network went down last Thursday, the second thing went down was their Helpline(1111), and at the same time they were no immediate updates on Celcom's website or their accounts on social networking until a couple hours later but it was too late.

It is important to use all sort of communications to let their own customers know about the network breakdown before even the customers find out, but Celcom choose to leave them in the dark. Even yesterday, no sms or apologies where sent out to customers. Is this the NUMBER 1 experience that Celcom is trying to give?

What Celcom should have done:
  • Update their social networking status- They should have communicated with a number of their mobile users using their existing accounts in social network such as Facebook.
  • Update their website- Their web team was extremely slow in putting up a notice on their website when the network went down. Supposedly, the notice should be up within an hour but I guess not many users even bothered to visit the Celcom website thanks to its superb design and outdated contents.
  • Domestic Roaming- When Celcom network was having problem, Maxis and DiGi network did not had any issues. If only there was a domestic agreement signed between these telcos, this post won't even exist because they wouldn't be any users complaining.
  • Send an apology message- Did Celcom notice that a large number of people was cursing them on Twitter? If I were Celcom, I would have sent a direct apology message to all these Celcom customers including those cursing for not being able to call a Celcom number.
  • Rebates/Discount on billing/airtime- Should Celcom customers get free calls/usage for one day? Let's see how Celcom value their customers.
Before I forgot, in 2007 here's what Celcom claimed- Number 1

The last time I reported Celcom had network problem was in November last year.

Friday, September 18, 2009

Mobile Operators on Twitter

Do you know that at least 5 mobile operators are on Twitter? Here's the list:

P1 WiMAX( Follow @P1W1Max)
Being on the first telco to start a twitter account in Malaysia, P1 has been doing very well with it. So far they have been responding to all enqueries, helping customers resolve problem and proving updates on P1 & social media. Personal I recommend you to follow this account if your are on Twitter. Follow @P1W1Max for consumer related updates or @P1Media for media enquiries.

DiGi (Follow @DiGi_Telco)
At least 10 people in DiGi is using this account to tweet. Although there are so many people, you don't see them twitting as much as P1. But the updates are worth following. One example of their tweet include "Lookin for AAR@DiGi Music Live tickets? We've created an app, for FB and Friendster, to get 'em! Check it out ". If you want updates on DiGi, follow them at @DiGi_Telco

Maxis (Follow @maxiscomms)
Maxis also recently started a Twitter account. In most cases, they talk about freebies, product, and marketing. Although @maxiscomms do take complaints from consumers, it still goes back to their customer service unlike P1 which they usually follow up for the customer. In other words, they are no difference from Maxis customer service if you make a complaint via Twitter. At least they have been active on Twitter and responding to most enquiries. A good start for Maxis in communicating with the customers!

Celcom (Follow @myxpax)
Claimed to be official for Celcom, this twitter account is handled by Blue Cube, a mobile phone dealer fully owned by Celcom. The tweets are mostly marketing related, personal(to the person tweetting), more updates on social media(rather than Xpax), and junks. If you want to be spammed on updates not related to Celcom, you may follow @myxpax and also @BlueCubeCelcom.

U Mobile (Follow @umobile018)
The person twitting for U Mobile is a friendly person, so it is easy to ask them questions via twitter. Updates mostly include product, marketing and promotions. You should follow this account if you are interested on U Mobile.

Hopefully more Telcos and IT related companies will be more "consumer friendly" by getting involve in social media.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Wireless Spectrum Allocations in Malaysia

Here's the latest spectrum allocation in Malaysia.
View the PDF file on SKMM website here.


Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Nine Ways a Cell Phone could Influence your health

Do you know that mobile phones could be more dangerous than cigarettes ? Here's nine ways it could influence your health.
  1. Brain tumors
  2. Fertility
  3. Insomnia
  4. Blackberry Thumb
  5. Mobile Phone Dermatitis
  6. The Dirty Doctor
  7. Driving Hazards
  8. Talking and walking.
  9. Hearing
Read the full story here