Telecom New Zealand to sell off AAPT, receives for bids
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: AAPT, the Australian unit of Telecom New Zealand (Telecom) will be sold off by the company. Four bidders have already understood to be in contention for acquiring the operator. TPG Telecom, Pacnet, Quadrangle Group and Optus are the four contenders who have submitted offers before the April 15 deadline.
Drop in revenue has been cited as the reason behind Telecom decision to sell the unit with AAPT generating AUD760 million (USD700 million) in 2009, down from AUD1 billion a year earlier. Even the EBITDA were down by around AUD27 million over the same twelve-month period, at AUD73 million.
Earlier it was reported that USD420 million for AAPT has been announced by Pacnet, and according to the company, it was considering a number of possible acquisitions in Australia.
Telecom New Zealand restores 3G mobile network, XT
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: The service of the third-generation mobile network, XT has been restored by Telecom Corp. of New Zealand Ltd. The network was running into trouble after experiencing fresh problems in the northern region on Thursday morning.
According to the spokesperson of the company, the problems involved network degradation rather than the network crashing, but they were widespread in the country’s largest city Auckland and in the northern region and the latest glitches in coverage to hit the telecom operator’s XT followed similar ones since the launch of the 3G network in May last year.
Customers are advised to use the landlines for emergency calls rather than mobile after the problems encountered in the network on Thursday. Services affected from 9am until noon, were back to normal.
Analysts have been citing several network problems as a reason behind the fall in the share price of the company and the operator has been vowing to fix all of them. As a result of the clunky technology in its old mobile network, the 3G network acting as the driver of the growth of the company is running under huge pressure.
Alca-Lu reflects damage control mode after NZ network failures
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: The repeated outages at the HSPA network supplied by Alcatel-Lucent to Telecom NZ have made the former go into a damage control mode. CEO of Alca- Lu, Ben Verwaayen went onto the airwaves to defend the company, but failed to explain the failures.
Verwaayen attributed the initial network problem to a serious hardware failure caused by traffic surges resulting from users trying to get back on the network which subsequently overloaded the system.
According to Paul Budde from Australian-based research firm Paul Budde Communications, the situation was getting very serious for Telecom New Zealand, damaging its credibility which in turn could weaken its chance of winning the next stage of the country’s fiber roll out project.
Telecom NZ faces another network crash, CTO resigns
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: After the fourth outage of the XT Mobile network, the chief technical officer of Telecom New Zealand submitted his resignation. The supplier of the faulty 3G network, Alcatel-Lucent, has also announced the replacement of its NZ manager Steve Lowe.
Jyoti Mahurkar-Thombre, former general manager of Alcatel Lucent’s Next Generation Networks’ product unit, has been named as new NZ manager by the company.
The XT Mobile network was crippled for up to 12 hours on Monday, its fourth outage in two months.
Telecom New Zealand’s Q2 earning down by 23.8%
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: Net earnings of NZD80 million (USD55.84 million) down from NZD105 million has been announced by Telecom New Zealand for the three months ended December 31, 2009. 6.5% year-on-year decline in revenues for the second quarter of the 2009/10 financial year has also been reported which is again down from NZD1.4 billion in 2Q08 to NZD1.32 billion a year later.
According to Paul Reynolds, Telecom CEO, telecom’s delivery of the turnaround remains on track, the quarter saw progress on a range of fronts, including the addition of 60,000 customers in mobile, Telecom Retail attracting 64% of broadband connection growth, reduced fixed line churn and the success of our cost out programme.
467,000 connections were established December 31, 2009 out of which 57% of the connections are post-paid, and 47% are new acquisitions. The average data revenues per user increased 19% and roaming revenues increased 111% when compared to Q2 in the previous financial year.
Telecom NZ’s EBITDA rises almost 2%
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: Telecom New Zealand’s EBITDA increased almost 2 percent year-on-year and revenues and net earnings slide in the second quarter ended December 31. With 1.7 percent increase, EBITDA rose to NZD 425 million from NZD 418 million.
However, the company suffered 6.5 percent decline in the revenues sliding to NZD 1.32 billion from NZD 1.41 billion in the year-ago quarter.
Telecom ended the quarter with 467,000 customers for its XT mobile network and by attracting 60,000 new mobile customers in the three-month period, the company ended the quarter with a total of 2.310 million mobile customers. Telecom Retail attracted 64 percent of the new customers during the quarter and held its market share at 57 percent.
TelstraClear’s 3G launched over Vodafone’s network (New Zealand)
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: Following the success of a two month pilot scheme, 3G service has been launched by MVNO TelstraClear over Vodafone’s network for business customers. The launch date has been preponed to take advantage of disgruntled customers in the wake of Telecom New Zealand’s recent 3G network failure.
The cellco used to provide services over Vodafone’s network but switched to Telecom in 2007 following a dispute but decided to move back to Vodafone after Telecom decided in May 2009 not to allow the MVNO to take credit on its 3G network.
According to TelstraClear, is targeting the post-paid market and is aiming for 100,000 subscribers within the next three years.
Telecom NZ legacy CDMA network failed again
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: A day after the announcement of NZ$5 million ($3.44 million) compensation package for customers affected by a prolonged network outage of 3G network, Telecom New Zealand’s legacy CDMA network again failed.
Currently, TNZ is reeling in the wake of the failure of its high-profile W-CDMA 850 service XT. Late last week, around 32 base stations on the Alcatel-Lucent built network went down.
This is the second outage of the Alcatel-Lucent supplied 3G network south of Taupo; in mid-December, the network also went down.
Meanwhile, rival TelstraClear launched its 3G service, which piggy backs of Vodafone’s WCDMA network, for business customers amid Telecom’s XT network woes.
Unwired Australia spearheads new WiMAX roaming alliance
Roaming is one of the critical success factors for any network seeking to be a global standard, and WiMAX is no exception. So far, the main roaming activity has centered on the pre-WiMAX Wi-Bro system, with the formation of the Wi-Bro and Mobile WiMAX Community (WMC) by leading Asian operators plus Covad.
Now a new alliance has burst on the scene, spearheaded by another hotbed of early Wi-MAX activity, Australasia. Inaugurated last week in Paris, the WiMAX Spectrum Owners’ Alliance (WiSOA) has set itself an ambitious target of connecting a billion users (though in an unspecified time frame).
It limits its membership to companies that own licenses and operate WiMAX or pre-WiMAX services, contrasting with a previous, defunct attempt at creating a roaming group – the WiMAX Global Roaming Alliance (WGRA) – which was largely based around license exempt WISPs.
The contrast reflects the shift of the WiMAX movement away from such markets and towards carrier class, licensed band deployments, but the fading of the WGRA does not detract from the truth of its objectives, expressed by CEO Doug Bonestroo, when he said: “We realise that the larger telecom providers have a virtual lock on the 3G marketplace, and that the best way to counter that leverage is with a large group of partners in the US and around the world that are committed to standards-based WiMAX roaming.”
The WiSOA’s founder members contain four from Australasia – Unwired Australia and Austar Australia (part of the US-based Liberty Group of John Malone); Telecom New Zealand and Woosh Telecom – plus WiMAX Telecom of Austria, Enertel from the Netherlands, Network Plus Mauritius, UK Broadband and Irish Broadband.
All these were early adopters of broadband wireless networks, and many are now migrating these to fully standardised WiMAX, which will enable relatively straightforward roaming, technically speaking at least.
The members said they would sign their first international WiMAX roaming agreement in December, covering all WiMAX frequency ranges. This agreement, they claim, will act as the backbone of a future global network.
A further 12 members are on the point of joining the alliance it claims, with Reliance Telecom of India likely to head the queue. The WiSOA will act as the enabler and coordinator of roaming agreements between different WiMAX members, in a similar way to some alliances formed for Wi-Fi hotspots and metrozones, notably the Wireless Broadband Alliance. It points out that roaming revenues in the GSM world amount to $25bn a year.
Steve Cosser, chairman of Unwired Australia and a pay TV millionaire, will chair the WiSOA. He said at the Paris meeting: “WiSOA was established to facilitate the adoption of WiMAX globally, and with its exclusive membership of spectrum owners only, is in a unique position to do so.”
It will work with the WiMAX Forum but has a more specific remit, which it may feel the forum has not prioritised – to accelerate roaming deals and, in so doing, to ensure that the value of licensed spectrum is fully realised by both government bodies and investors.
Source- http://www.theregister.co.uk
Technorati : Australia, GSM, Mobile, WiMAX
Ice Rocket : Australia, GSM, Mobile, WiMAX
Technorati : Australia, GSM, Mobile, WiMAX
Ice Rocket : Australia, GSM, Mobile, WiMAX
