A recent research report has claimed that the Asia-Pacific region will reach 2.3 billion mobile finance services users by 2015.
According to research, mFinance will become a service that will change APAC’s financial behaviour by introducing innovative business models, partnerships and best practices.
As the largest mobile market in the world, Asia-Pacific accounted for 48.5% of the global mobile subscribers in 2010.
Bytemobile, a mobile internet services provider has announced that it has secured a 36th video optimization deal. With this deal, the company will deploy services across mobile network operators in Europe, the Middle East, Asia Pacific and the US.
Bytemobile has live deployments of its video service on the networks of 21 operators worldwide, with a contractual commitment of 15 additional deployments as of March 1.
The company’s Unison Smart Capacity platform has also been deployed with over 125 operators in 60 countries, serving more than 2 billion subscribers worldwide.
A recent research study has revealed that mass consumption of recorded music continues to evolve, as ownership continues to diminish in importance. Researchers forecast that by 2016 streaming (cloud-based) services will become a more important form of access to music than owning albums, songs or tracks. This shift will primarily be driven by the growing use of mobile handsets, especially smartphones, as listening devices.
According to researchers, the number of subscribers to mobile music streaming services is expected to approach 5.9 million by the end of this year. Researchers believe that the number will exceed 161 million subscribers in 2016, meaning a compound annual growth rate of nearly 95%. Sometime in 2012 the Asia-Pacific area will become the largest regional market for mobile music streaming.
The biggest winners from these developments are likely to be consumers, and the vendors and the service providers enabling these new models, such as Rhapsody, Melon and Spotify. Record labels, producers and other middlemen whose businesses have been shaken by content piracy also stand to gain from streaming services as they have an opportunity to monetize a lot of consumption that would otherwise take place outside their revenue base. For musical artists, there are both positives and negatives: it will be more difficult to make a living by selling recorded music, but the barriers to wide product distribution are falling fast.
Retail prices for music-in-the-cloud are expected to show a gradual decline as these services reach mass markets, although it is believed that forecasts of declining prices are based on the assumption that the rights-holders will lower their royalty demands. Record labels and collecting societies should not overplay their hands when it comes to royalty issues. If consumers do not have convenient and affordable legal alternatives, they will simply enjoy their music by other means.
A senior Motorola executive has stated that India’s public safety system and network expansion is set to double every three years, especially, with the arming of police with digital radio sets.
According to Balbir Singh, Vice President, Sales and Operations at Motorola Solutions Asia Pacific, they are experiencing strong demand for radio-based systems from Indian police force as well as private sectors such as oil and gas industries, coal mines and industrial production centres. The growth is driven by rising security concern across the country.
As per him, these radio sets are more effective in allowing communication between various locations and command centres, helping the police manage any emergency. On the private sector, Coal India has recently selected Motorola systems to manage its mine operations. Moreover, Indian enterprises are very fast in adopting technologies and they believe the Indian market will leapfrog in taking on the best digital systems, leaving analogs aside. They have been leading the radio-based communication market in India for four decades and have now established a working relationship in supplying handsets to police. They also provide training to the police on the effective use of handsets.
Singh further stated that besides the radios, Motorola has a wide range of communication sets in India, a market being served for more than 40 years.
Going forward, Singh sees Indian Postal Services and Courier Services using computers for deliveries in rural areas.
He pointed out that rural India is a huge market where the postman will be using mobile computers to serve the people.
According to Singh, Motorola’s Indian operations were fully supported by India’s software engineers who are involved in designing the software and setting up network for the radio sets. Motorola also operates its biggest research and development centre in Bangalore, software programmes from which are used for its systems globally. Besides the domestic consumer market, the country eventually would emerge as a major exporter with corporate India collaborating and merging local and international technologies in products for the global markets.
A study has revealed that sales of smartphones such as Apple’s iPhone4 are set to reach 100 million units for the first time this year in the Asia Pacific market. A team of researchers believes that smartphone sales are projected to hit 137 million units in 2011, up from nearly 84 million last year.
According to researchers, smartphones were a hot item in 2010, with more than double the shipments of 2009. It added that the growth came from the region’s more developed markets such as South Korea.
This fire is expected to keep burning as mobile phone vendors race to get consumers on higher-margin devices, operators look to pull up revenues on mobile data, and mobile platform stakeholders battle to woo app developers.
In addition to operating as a telephone, smartphones allow users to send and receive emails, access Facebook and Twitter accounts, download movies, music and books and perform multiple other functions while on the go.
It is believed that by 2015, three in five phones sold in the region will be smartphones, an increase from one in five in 2010.
In the face of the smartphones attack, feature phones or devices that perform the basic functions still held their ground.
Sales of feature phones grew 17% in 2010, driven by low-end brands priced below $100 from China, India and other countries.
A new research report has revealed that while Ericsson holds on to the top spot for service delivery platform (SDP) services revenue, as does Oracle for SDP software revenue, Huawei leads the overall SDP market and continues to display momentum that could very well displace Ericsson and/or Oracle from their leadership positions in 2011.
Researchers forecast that the worldwide SDP software and services market to reach $5.2 billion in 2015. Interest in API exposure continues to fuel momentum in the SDP market, as do operators’ app store strategies, although operators are increasingly regarding these initiatives as ways to differentiate their offerings in competitive markets as opposed to significant revenue opportunities. While consumer services continue to be a primary driver behind SDP market growth, they see an emerging opportunity in the B2B space, including using SDPs to support machine-to-machine (M2M) applications and cloud-based application delivery to the enterprise and SMB market.
The report also says that momentum around the cloud services opportunity will generate interest in using an SDP to support the on-demand, real-time service requirements associated with a cloud offering.
SDP markets growing the fastest include developing regions in Asia Pacific, Central and Latin America (CALA), and the Middle East, where operators’ SDP deployments have begun to pick up steam.
KDDI America Inc., the U.S. division of KDDI Corporation, a Global Fortune 500 company and worldwide leader in international telecommunications services, today announced that it has launched KDDI America MetroWave in the Los Angeles metropolitan area extending up the West Coast. This service offering provides a wide variety of flexible and affordable, high-performance network services to customers on the West Coast, the International Gateway to Asia Pacific.
The KDDI network will connect between the major data centers on the West Coast such as TELEHOUSE Los Angeles, Equinix LA1 Los Angeles, Equinix SV8 Palo Alto, and Equinix SV1 San Jose. By connecting the metro networks between these data centers, KDDI America can provide Internet or Ethernet services as a very cost effective solution to their customer base. Enterprises, ISPs, or content providers who are seeking access from their data center on the West Coast to Asia or from Asia to their data center will benefit.
By deploying the optical technology of dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) in its metro fiber network, KDDI America is capable of accommodating high-capacity circuits within multiple sites in the West Coast area. Through a wavelength of light on an optical fiber, seamless interconnections are available to different transport interfaces such as SDH/SONET, as well as Ethernet transport high-capacity from OC48 scaling up to OC192 and 1Gbps scaling up to 10Gbps. Separated wavelengths of capacity per fiber strand allow KDDI America to provide flexible, high-speed bandwidth and scalability with faster provisioning lead times. MetroWave has backbone capacity of up to 800Gbps.
The KDDI America MetroWave network is seamlessly integrated to connect customers located at any of the four data centers to KDDI America’s existing network services including its Internet, IP-VPN and domestic and global Ethernet service offerings, US Powered Ethernet Network (US-PEN) and KDDI Global Powered Ethernet Network (GPEN). As a result, customers can access MetroWave from any of US-PEN’s Points of Presence which include New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA; Palo Alto, CA; Chicago, IL; Ashburn, VA and Dallas, TX. By having access to TELEHOUSE’s global network of data centers, KDDI America can offer its customers colocation and network services in safe, secure data centers with low-latency connectivity in 22 cities in 15 countries around the world.
“In the past year, KDDI America has seen a heightened demand for connectivity over wavelength services from several industries such as software providers, entertainment and media firms,” said Sandra de Novellis, Director of Marketing, KDDI America. “KDDI America meets its customers’ needs by allowing them to expand their network seamlessly from Los Angeles to San Francisco and beyond by connecting them to the International Gateway.”
Customers interested in learning more about MetroWave products and pricing should contact KDDI America by dialing 212-295-1200 or email at marketing@kddia.com.
About KDDI America
KDDI America is the U.S. division of the KDDI Group of companies, a Fortune Global 500 company and leading provider of international telecommunications and collocation facilities around the world. KDDI America provides high-quality network solutions to clients with telecommunication needs throughout Asia Pacific, where it is particularly strong. KDDI Group is a pioneer and innovator in the Ethernet world, being the first telecom provider to provide switched Ethernet services between Asia and the United States. KDDI is also a leading provider in international data centers and value-added services through its group company, TELEHOUSE, in the United States, Europe and Asia. For more information about KDDI America, please visitwww.kddia.com.
Alcatel-Lucent is predicting that commercial LTE services will be launched across India by 2012, a development that markets in Western Europe should see as a warning that they are losing ground in the mobile broadband race.
According to Rajeev Singh Molares, President of Alcatel-Lucent’s Asia-Pacific operations, the people that bought [BWA licences] paid enormous amounts of money for them, so they’re going to have to build something with it if they want to see a return.
According to reports, he expects LTE trials to take place in India in the next four to six months. There will be commercial services launching in Q4, or Q1 [next year].
India’s BWA (broadband wireless access) spectrum auction, conducted throughout May and June 2010 raised $8.23 billion, with Infotel Broadband Services winning a nationwide licence with a bid of $2.74 billion. The company was subsequently acquired by Reliance Industries for around $1.06 billion.
Other notable winners from the BWA auction included Aircel, which won licences in eight of India’s 22 telecom service areas; Bharti Airtel, in four areas; and U.S. chip maker Qualcomm, which also picked up licences in four areas.
Singh Molares hinted that developments around LTE in India, as well as China which has designs on exporting its homegrown TD-LTE standard ,could indicate that Western Europe is beginning to lag behind the rest of the world when it comes to the next-generation mobile broadband. Western Europe was the centre of wireless innovation during the 80s and 90s.
However, he pointed out that Silicon Valley has introduced new operating systems and tablet devices to the mobile market, while U.S. operators like Verizon and MetroPCS are busy rolling out LTE coverage.
Europe meanwhile has seen LTE launches across the Nordics, as well as Germany, Austria, Estonia, and Uzbekistan, but other major markets such as France, the U.K., Italy, Spain and Switzerland have yet to auction the necessary spectrum, and the Netherlands has sold LTE airwaves but has yet to see any commercial launches.
Alcatel-Lucent and China Mobile have announced that they are planning to develop a centralized, collaborative, Cloud-based RAN (C-RAN).
The companies believe that the C-RAN will provide a common platform for multi-mode wireless standards such as GSM, 3G, and LTE, and is expected to lower OPEX by up to 50% and CAPEX by 15%.
According to Rajeev Singh-Molares, President of Alcatel-Lucent’s activities in Asia-Pacific, the partnership with China Mobile is directly addressing the challenges of high energy costs, explosion of mobile video and sustainable development. By helping them replace traditional network designs with flexible cloud-like architectures, they are preparing the future and help show the way in terms of technology and economic models.
The strategic partnership for C-RAN will leverage Alcatel-Lucent’s recently-announced lightRadio platform.
