Indian operators file appeal against Trai’s 2G plan
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: Airtel, Vodafone Essar and Idea Cellular filed an appeal on Monday to the telecom tribunal against deeply-flawed recommendations by the regulator on the pricing of second-generation (2G) spectrum that they currently use.
The issue is crucial for incumbent mobile operators as paying higher fees for existing as well as future 2G spectrum will be a big financial burden for telcos, especially Bharti and Vodafone, as their profits have already come under pressure due to the intense tariff war.
On the first day of the auction for wireless broadband spectrum, bidding closed 35% higher than the reserve price of Rs 1,750 crore and it is expected to be as frenetic as the auction for 3G airwaves that lasted 34 days and delivered an unexpected bonanza of Rs 67,719 crore to the government.
According to analysts all over the world, operators will be aggressive in procuring BWA licenses in those circles where they did not obtain 3G licenses.
Scheduled-SMS scheme launched by Tata DoCoMo and Airtel
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: If you thought that the price war has reached its peak, here is another dice thrown by the purveyor of the tariff war, Tata DoCoMo. The company has taken the price war at a whole new level by announcing Timed SMS†scheme in which users type an SMS right now and provide a later date and time, when that SMS will actually be sent to the recipient.
Airtel has also joined the play by going a step ahead while pricing this service. While TataDoCoMo charges Rs.3 for a pre-scheduled SMS, Airtel’s Timer SMS†cost just Rs.1 for the same. Besides, Airtel also has provision for cancelling the pre-scheduled SMS. In this, the customers can send STOP to their own number, followed by cancellation instructions.
A correction message will be send by Airtel if the scheduled message for date / time is already past. In case of Tata DoCoMo, Timed SMS†includes extra 5 characters (‘TSMS’) in the message, whereas Airtel’s Timer SMS†does not add any such extra characters.
Tariff war raises concern in India
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: The brutal price war rocking India for the past few months may certainly be lucrative for customers but it has raised the concern of the analysts, who could not see any end for this bloodbath. The latest offer by Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited of as little as half a paisa (100 paisa are in a rupee) a second for a call, India’s telecoms market, already the cheapest in the world, just got cheaper.
The rapidly growing telecom market of India, which already has about 500m subscribers and adds about 10m new users a month, is considered one of the key drivers of its economic growth in recent years.
Analysts believe the industry may have too many operators chasing a market in which subscriber numbers are high but average monthly spending by users on phone calls is very low.
After the first shot in the current price war was fired earlier this year by Tata DoCoMo, other telecom operators joining the game and the continuously plunging call rates have made telecoms the worst performing sector in India’s stock market, going down by 27 per cent this year.
The government’s plan to introduce number portability at the end of this month, in which users can retain their existing mobile number while swapping between vendors is, expected to promote another round of price competition.
Whatever concerns the industry analysts may have, the festival of low rate has just begun for the consumers.
India’s state run telco BSNL joins per second billing club
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: With almost all the private telecom operators joining the tariff war in India, even the state run telcos are not far behind, with BSNL being the latest entry. The company has offered two options to the subscribers by reducing its national roaming charges- one of the offer is 49 paise per minute and the other is one paise per second.
Apart from the above two offers, there is also an offer which will charge 1 paise per second to calls on its own network and 1.2 paise per second to other networks while on roaming.
The pay per second billing system has given rise to the tariff war in India. According to BSNL chairman and managing director Kuldeep Goyal, the reason behind the slashing of roaming charges is to bring the advantage of BSNL’s network to its customers.
Roaming charges on Vodafone reduced by 50% in India
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: Adding a new spice to the latest tariff war in the world’s fastest-growing cellular market, India, Vodafone Essar, reduced its roaming charges by more than 50% besides offering the option for per-second pulse.
The pay per second plan launched by TATA DoCoMo has made the other operators to join the war. Some are even coming up with other lucrative plans like 50 paise per minute, for all types of calls, local as well as roaming by Reliance Communications and to 60 paisa per minute roaming charges by Bharti Airtel.
Though the customers are benefiting a lot from this tariff war, the mobile operators are losing out on revenues. The stock prices of listed telecom operators like Bharti Airtel, RelCom and others are sliding.
One of the major reasons behind this war is to attract the new users as new operators are entering the market. Norway’s Telenor launch made it the 12th operator playing in the Indian market while, Arab’s second-biggest carrier Etisalat is planning to enter India.
BSNL puts Zain purchase on hold.
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) has put its plan to be a part of the consortium looking to buy a stake in Kuwait’s Mobile Telecommunications Co, on hold. The decision was taken as the information sorted by Vavasi Group has still not been received.
Vavasi Group which is not yet listed in India had tied up with Al-Bukhary group of Malaysia to buy a 46% stake in Zain. It was trying to add state-owned Indian telecommunications firm like BSNL and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd., to the consortium. By joining the consortium, BSNL and MTNL seek to widen its horizon beyond India.
Earlier, Gurudas Kamat, India’s junior telecom minister had said that both MTNL and BSNL are not very serious about joining the consortium.
The state owned telecom companies are facing stiff competition from private sector companies. According to BSNL Chairman Kuldeep Goyal, BSNL’s revenue is going to be severely hit by the latest tariff war in the current financial year.
The company is planning to add 20 million working lines to its present 50 million on the global system for mobile communication platform, over the next six months. Besides, it is also planning to spend INR140 billion in the current fiscal year to expand its mobile services.
Bangladesh among Asia’s top 10 mobile markets
has emerged as one of
‘s top 10 mobile phone markets in terms of adding net subscribers, according to the chairman of GSM Asia Pacific, a regional forum of the Generalised System of Multiple Access (GSMA) mobile operators, reports BDNEWS.
GSM Asia Pacific Chairman Mehboob Chowdhury warned that though Bangladesh the 8th top mobile market in Asia, ahead of Thailand and Philippines, it would be impossible to retain that position unless the government immediately purged the industry of the ‘counterproductive’ policies and shook up the telecom regulators.
Besides, the country has added 8.945 million GSMA mobile users in a single year — from July 2005 to June 2006, according to the latest figure of GSMA association.
In an exclusive interview with the news agency, Chowdhury disclosed thatnow ranked eighth among the top 10 Asian mobile markets in terms of adding net subscribers during January to March, 2006.
Citing the data of Informal Telecoms and Media, a London-based research firm, he saidhas had 1.265 million new users during the first quarter of 2006. The figure is slightly lower than the net addition ofandcombined, and marginally lower than seventh-ranked’s first quarter intake.
, fifth on the list, has added more than two million mobile subscribers during this period, but its total clientele was smaller than whathad in the first quarter of 2006.
GSM Asia Pacific chairman credited the cellular mobile operators with this achievement while being critical of the government’s ‘pounding the industry with disruptive policies’.
“When the operators made new connections affordable and started slashing the call charges; the government came up with this disastrous tax last year. It was a bolt from the blue (for the operators) that slowed down the market for a while.”
The new 8.945 million GSMA mobile users that have putin the global map is the result of the operators’ continuous effort, Chowdhury pointed out.
The new customers belong to the middle-to-lower income bracket that have been perennially ‘harassed’ by the state-run Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Board (BTTB) in trying to get regular phone connections.
“The private sector has salvaged them and that’s why the subscribers identity module (SIM) tax is grossly an anti-people move, which the government should scrap ahead of the election.”
“The market could have added at least four million more customers, there could have been an euphoric outbreak of tariff war and the government could have earned more revenue from the boom (if the tax were not there)”, Chowdhury continued.
Liking the slapping of SIM tax to killing the golden goose, he said this testifies to ‘the government’s inability’ to understand the fundamentals of this business.
He refused to give the government much credit for slashing the tax from mobile phone handsets.
“The amount of tax the government has withdrawn from handset is the exact amount it has simultaneously imposed as SIM tax and the burden remains unchanged for new customers”, pointed out Chowdhury, who was GrameenPhone’s marketing director for five years and Banglalink’s Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) for nearly a year until resigning recently .
He said more than two billion people use GSM mobile phones worldwide, accounting for an 82.4 per cent penetration. Asia Pacific region alone boasts 757.13 million GSMA mobile users and the figure is fast growing.
“Every second 18 new GSM users are being added worldwide, which means more than 1,000 customers in every minute and over 1.5 million new GSMA mobile users per day.”
Chowdhury said the next billion GSMA customers are mostly coming from,,,,,,and other similar economies.
He recognised continuous investment as the key component for sustainable mobile phone market growth in.
Effective telecommunications regulatory regime is, however, the precondition to wooing new investments and boosting competition.
“The Bangladesh Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (BTRC) has become merely an extension of the taxation department and that is certainly not the case with,or”, he said.
“[And] That’s why the telecom markets of these South Asian countries have been consistently thriving.”
More than 85 per cent of the mobile phone users have no access to the largest fixed telephone operator BTTB, the state-owned monopoly that has little relevance in today’s mobile market, Chowdhury regretted.
“The mobile operators will not even bother to talk to the BTTB the moment the government ends its monopoly on the international voice gateway”, he predicted.
The BTTB’s denial to provide interconnection is a clear breach of the telecoms law and resents the regulator’s ‘unfair concession’ for BTTB on this issue, the former Banglalink CCO said.
The government is ‘draining’ public funds on ‘impractical projects’ like VoIP platforms, he complained.
“Besides, ignoring the country’s fundamental telecommunication needs, the government is going to waste hundreds of millions of dollars in highly debatable and grossly unproductive supplier’s credit telecoms schemes”, he added.
The government has to deploy reliable nationwide telecoms infrastructure and then ensure the private sector’s equitable access to that resource, Chowdhury suggested.
“This is what Pakistan, India and many other fast developing countries are doing and Bangladesh should waste no time to reinvent the wheel”, he remarked.
Source- http://www.financialexpress-bd.com
Technorati : BTRC, Bangladesh, GSM, Mobile
Ice Rocket : BTRC, Bangladesh, GSM, Mobile
