Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
A group of Asian mobile carriers has formed an alliance to "enhance members' competitiveness in international roaming and corporate mobile services in their own countries/regions and across Asia-Pacific." It is the third such entity to have been formed in the past three years.
The alliance comprises Far EasTone Telecommunications Co (Taiwan), Hutchison Essar (India), Hutchison Telecommunications Hong Kong (Hong Kong and Macau), KT Freetel (Korea), NTT DoCoMo (Japan), PT Indosat (Indonesia) and StarHub (Singapore).
It promises to provide multinationals as well as business and leisure travellers with "greater convenience, ease of use and value-added mobile features" when they roam onto other members' mobile networks.
The alliance, tentatively called the "Asia-Pacific Mobile Alliance," boasts a combined customer base of about 100 million mobile subscribers over eight countries and regions, and says it plans to expand its membership over time.
It will promote voice, video and data roaming via members' GSM/GPRS and /or W-CDMA networks, with an intention to launch roaming via HSDPA networks "once the market is ready". These initiatives are targeted for launch in the latter half of 2006.
Another aim of the alliance is to create a 'Virtual Home Environment' amongst customers of member operators, so that they are able to experience seamless, convenient mobile-related services when they roam. It promises that customers will be able to get caller ID display and a short-code service to allow them quick and easy connection to their home country/region operator's voice mail and customer-support centre, etc. The alliance is also planning to enhance cross-border customer support for multinational corporations.
The first such alliance, the Asian Mobility Initiative, was formed in 2003 with Telstra, its Hong Kong subsidiary CSL, Maxis (Malaysia), MobileOne (Singapore) and Smart (Philippines) as members. By mid 2005 the organisation appeared to be defunct, but in mid 2005 Telecom Malaysia joined through its subsidiaries, TM International and Celcom. Telecom Malaysia said its membership would increase AMI's total subscribers by 35 percent from the 37 million as at 31 March 2005 to 49.8 million, and that AMI's membership now included CTM Macau and DTAC of Thailand.
The organisation, however has an extremely low profile: it has no website and a search on Google yielded less than 10 hits.
The most ambitious such alliance is the Bridge Mobile Alliance, formed in November 2004. It has taken the form of a Singapore incorporated entity in which key members hold equity, and, at its launch committed to investing around $US40 million over three years to "build and establish a shared regional mobile infrastructure, to develop seamless cross-border services and deliver a suite of regional mobile services across the Asia Pacific region."
Operator members are Airtel (India), CSL (Hong Kong), Globe Telecom (Philippines), Maxis (Malaysia), SingTel Mobile (Singapore), SingTel Optus (Australia), Taiwan Mobile (Taiwan) and Telkomsel (Indonesia). In addition to its principle members it also has an associate member program and now boasts a total of 18 associate and operator members. Associate members are Axalto, Ericsson, Gemplus, Hewlett Packard, LogicaCMG, Motorola, Nokia, QUALCOMM Siemens which became a member on April 19) and ZTE.
In mid 2005 LogicaCMG announced that it had been chosen as the solutions and systems integration partner for Bridge Mobile. "LogicaCMG is setting up the underlying core infrastructure with a common access gateway and a wholesale billing and settlement system, as well as enabling the initial service offering of Bridge Prepaid," the company said. The access gateway was to comprise LogicaCMG's Open Messaging Gateway (OMG) and Aepona Causeway - the standards-based integration backbone for convergent networks.
Also at that time BSS/OSS supplier Intec revealed that Bridge was using its InterconnecT v7 billing and settlement system, developed in partnership with LogicaCMG to facilitate its regional mobile infrastructure and a common service platform for pre-paid subscribers across the Asia-Pacific region. Aepona Causeway is one of the key integration platform for service development.
David Bass
| ComOps, a leading Australian provider of business software products and services, has won a competitive tender to deploy its Salvus safety, r…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
Latest Headlines from IT INDUSTRY
