Satelindo lost a massive 3.24m customers

The Indonesian market has seen phenomenal growth in recent quarters, but in Q1 09 there was a definite cooling off. The previous seven quarters had seen net additions in excess of 7m, with a peak of 14.94m in Q3 08, but in Q1 09 there was a gain of just 4.47m. This was the lowest figure since Q3 06. The total market reached 144.64m with penetration at 56.8%. Although Annual growth was still impressive at 41.0%, despite falling from 48.2% in the prior twelve-month period, but on a quarterly basis the uplift of 3.2% was the lowest for more than ten years.

This slump can be attributed to the performances of the second and third largest operators in the market, Satelindo and Excelcomindo (XL). Having seen impressive growth in recent quarters, particularly in Q2 08 when they added more than 10m customers on aggregate, both saw substantial net losses to their customer bases in Q1 09. Satelindo lost a massive 3.24m customers while XL was down 1.12m. Satelindo's loss was particularly worrying: although its second place is secure with 33.27m customers at the end of the quarter, more than 8.3m ahead of XL, in terms of market share it was down to 23.0%. This represented a 3.0pp quarterly loss. Moreover, it was the lowest figure the company has recorded since its very first quarter of operation in Q4 94.

By contrast, market leader Telkomsel put in a storming quarter, adding 6.83m customers. This was the second best result ever recorded on the Indonesian market, the best being the company's own Q3 08 gain of 8.06m. Having reached 60m customers in Q3 08 and 65m in Q4 08, Q1 09 saw Telkomsel smash the 70m barrier to finish on 72.13m. It thereby gained 3.3pp of market share in the quarter, although this was not quite enough to undo previous declines and it finished on 49.9%, down 0.1pp year on year.




There were mixed results for the smaller operators. Natrindo added 1.05m to finish on 3.90m, thus closing in on Hutchison, which added 0.80m to finish on 5.31m. Meanwhile, amongst the CDMA operators Smart added 0.49m while Mobile-8 lost 0.45m, its third successive quarterly loss: this left Smart just 150k short of its rival on 2.05m.

This article was extracted from The Mobile World Briefing, the weekly newsletter from The Mobile World. Read More..

Telkom Gets 5 International Awards

PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia Tbk (Telkom) obtained five awards from FinanceAsia Magazine, a magazine about the economy with the polling system.

These awards are Best Managed Company, Best Corporate Governance, Best Investor Relations, Best Corporate Social Responsibilty, and Most Committed to Strong Dividend Policy.

Overall, surveys conducted in 10 include China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, involving approximately 250 investors and analysts.

FinanceAsia is a leading publishing company in Hong Kong which was established since 1996. Now, the company that has a bureau in Singapore and Sydney, the fully owned by Haymarket Publishing, one of the largest publishing company in the UK.

FinanceAsia output products are FinanceAsia magazine specializing in the areas of discussion of the capital market and banking with a circulation ranging from Australia to Vietnam. Read More..

BlackBerry Axis - 40% Cheaper Rates

The new BlackBerry services, Axis offers to slap tariffs of 40% cheaper. Axis promises no hidden requirements of the application of the provisions of that charge.

Axis package provides daily, weekly and monthly respectively Rp 3,900, Rp 25,000 and Rp 100,000. Package is more thrifty than 40% of tariffs on the market.

Axis is the latest provider of BlackBerry services in Indonesia. Previously, this service has been offered three operator, Telkomsel, Indosat, and Excelcomindo Pratama.

Axis has 3500 BTS in major cities, including Jakarta, Bandung, Yogyakarta, Bali, Medan, and Lombok. More than 25% of BTS can provide access to 3G. Read More..

The Transformation to NGN in the Wireless Backhaul

A number of leading mobile carriers in Asia/Pacific, in countries such as Australia, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, Japan, Philippines, and Singapore, are already starting to connect parts of their metropolitan 3G/HSPA backhauls with Carrier Ethernet over fiber.

The main driver of this transformation is the need for mobile operators to provide scalable, high-bandwidth, web 2.0 video and audio content, and internet access services for both mobile and fixed users in incremental CAPEX outlays.

Mobile operators in the region are faced with five key challenges that are driving the need for more bandwidth to the end-user devices (downlink and uplink):

• Enhancing coverage spanning dense urban, suburban, and rural areas.
• In markets where pre-paid services is dominant, value added data services need to be geared to lower-speed bandwidth while post-paid centric markets must typically target premium value added services.
• Potentially exponential increases in data traffic once higher speeds are enabled will not necessarily translate into higher data average revenue per user (ARPU).
• Declining voice ARPU means that data ARPU must be increased in the long-term.
• Network OPEX will need to be carefully contained so that it does not grow disproportionately with traffic demand growth.

The combination of the third and fourth challenges means that operators need to offer scalable bandwidth but at tariff schedules that resemble a combination of flat-rate plateaus with specific usage caps. Without the scalable bandwidth in the backhaul, operators will not be able to balance OPEX and CAPEX, and could find themselves in the noncompetitive situation of not being able to offer new multimedia-rich wireless services because of incremental bandwidth constraints.

Without such a transformation of the wireless backhaul, the promise of 3.5G and 4G systems such as LTE will not be feasible. The emergence of bandwidth hungry devices such as Apple's 3G iPhone and Google's Android-operating system based devices means that mobile operators need to begin the transformation to NGN in the backhaul urgently in order to avoid being branded as obsolete.

Green IT will put additional pressure on radio access network (RAN) and backhaul designs to become more energy efficient which means that equipment vendors will need to balance computational power at the basestation versus that in the local exchanges and mobile switching centers. Basestations that have router functionality will be able to provide peer-to-peer communications within the network. The multitude of radio standards is also putting pressure on vendors to implement re-configurable software solutions in the basestation. If operators delay the revamp of their mobile core networks to an all-IP platform, they will be left behind. The reductions in OPEX will justify the effort during the current economic downturn.



The rapid emergence of converged mobile devices with 3.5G HSDPA and WiFi, dual-mode support and the imminent entry of 802.16e Mobile WiMAX devices mean that operators are facing a situation where users will expect 1Mbps speed all the time, anywhere and everywhere. This is in stark contrast to the existing 2G/2.5G/3G networks of today, which have hotspot like coverage for high-speed wireless data services. An all-IP infrastructure only exists in some of the next-generation fixed-line networks in Asia/Pacific, some of the early mobile WiMAX networks, and in recently constructed greenfield 3G networks. In most cases in the Asia/Pacific region, the 3G UMTS (WCDMA) radio basestations are connected via E1/T1 leased lines aggregated in groups of 1-8, in an effort to provide up to 15Mbps per cell site. HSPA or 3.5G, CDMA2000 EV-DO, and mobile WiMAX operate with a theoretical maximum of 10-30Mbps per sector depending on the amount of frequency allocated to the operator.

With LTE just around the corner, which could see peak capacity of over 100-150 Mbps per cell site, operators who choose to deploy LTE in dense urban areas could be facing huge bandwidth requirements that will invariably put enormous stress on the existing backhaul and transport infrastructure. Femto LTE and HSPA access points can help alleviate backhaul congestion in markets where FTTX or xDSL is widely deployed but in the rest of the markets, the backhaul will need to be a combination of fiber and NGN microwave/Fixed WiMAX. Read More..

The 1GHz Smartphone Has Arrived.

The 1GHz smartphone has arrived. A Japanese telecommunications carrier is the first to launch a device based on Qualcomm's much-anticipated Snapdragon processor.

Docomo is now offering the T-01A in Japan, while Microsoft is pitching the phone on its Japanese Web site.

This would mark the first commercially available product using the Snapdragon chip, a Qualcomm spokeswoman confirmed Monday. The chip's claim to fame is that it's an ARM design running at 1GHz. Typical ARM architecture chips used in mobile phones, such as the iPhone 3G S, peak at about 600MHz.



A legion of other chip suppliers offer ARM-based chips for mobile devices, including Texas Instruments, Freescale Semiconductor, Samsung, Nvidia, STMicroelectronics, and Broadcom.

The Toshiba-Docomo T-01A--which will be offered outside of Japan as the TG01--runs Windows Mobile 6.1 and is designed to take on the iPhone. Only 9.9mm thick, it uses a 4.1-inch WVGA 800x480 384k pixel resistive touch screen and comes with support for 3G HSPA, Wi-Fi, GPS and assisted-GPS.

The TG01 is also slated to be available in Europe this summer.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon silicon supports high-definition (720p) video decode, 3D graphics (up to 22M triangles/sec), XGA display support, a 12-megapixel camera, and mobile broadcast TV.

Qualcomm has been talking up the Snapdragon (aka QSD8250) since November 2007, when the company announced initial sample shipments of the chipset.

And Qualcomm won't stop at 1GHz. The San Diego-based company has demonstrated Netbooks running a 1.3GHz Snapdragon processor and will eventually push the chip to 1.5GHz.

The future Qualcomm QSD8672 will be a dual-core Snapdragon that features two CPU computing cores and will include HSPA+, up to 28Mbps download speeds, 1080p high-definition video, Wi-Fi, mobile TV, and GPS. The graphics core is based on Advanced Micro Devices' ATI unit's technology. Read More..