Telecom Asia articles from March 2003

Telecom Asia archives from March 2003

M&A the way to grow. (Inside Line).(Pacific Century CyberWorks Ltd's attempt to buy Cable & Wireless)
March 1, 2003... Why would one debt-laden carrier with a subterranean stock price want to buy another? PCCW's lamentable attempt to snap up Cable & Wireless last month had analysts knowingly shaking their head, like relatives watching an alcoholic falling off...

Hutchison's video thing. (Inside Line).(H3G's service package covers voice and video calls )
March 1, 2003... "It's video, stupid." That has to be the slogan of H3G UK's marketing team. Under the "3" brand, the company announced last month it will offer three packages ranging from a pay-as-you-go with no monthly fee to a 99 [pounds sterling] ($164) a...

Children of the Napster revolution. (Tanner).
March 1, 2003... As a fan of both music and technology, I've found the current legal battle between the record industry and file-sharing outfits such as KaZaa, Grokster and the late great Napster both fascinating and frustrating--fascinating because of the...

Subsea vendors pin hopes on upgrades and new tech. (First Mile).
March 1, 2003... Following last year's barrage of bankruptcies, the atmosphere at the annual Pacific Telecommunications Council (PTC) gathering in Hawaii this year was more hung over than sober, as one delegate observed. Indeed, carriers and financial...

India's bandwidth boom. (Stat Snap).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... India has been on a fiber-optic deployment spree over the past couple of years, making it the fourth-largest fiber-optic market (behind Japan, the US, and China)in terms of global demand, according to a new KMI report on single-mode optical...

Indian fiber: annual deployment. (Stat Snap).(Brief Article)(Illustration)
March 1, 2003... Indian fiber Annual deployment 2000 1,231,850 2001 1,359,300 2002 3,126,600 Note: Table made from bar graph. Unit: kilometers Source: KMI

Chinese telcos play it forward. (News Analysis).(Fixed line carriers are in stand-off with mobile counterparts over deployment of call-forwarding service)
March 1, 2003... China's fixed line carriers are in a stand-off with their mobile counterparts over deployment of a controversial call-forwarding service. The service, branded "youzi guijia" (which literally means "traveling son, coming home"), diverts...

India trials city-based wireless local loops: flashbacks, updates and nostalgia: Telecom Asia, March 1996. (Resend).
March 1, 2003... SYNOPSIS: India's telecoms regulator/incumbent telco, the Department of Telecommunications (DOT) issues a mandate obliging prospective basic telephony service providers building their local loop infrastructure to use either wireless local loop...

Island-hopping for growth in Indonesia. (News Analysis).(Mobile subscriber data)
March 1, 2003... Coverage has become the key to competition in Indonesia, as carriers seek to expand out of the well-served Java market. Currently, the island is home to 8 million subscribers, representing the vast majority of Indonesia's market of 11.5 million...

Drawing dollars from hotspots. (News Analysis).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Asia's operators are pushing into wireless LAN: hotspots are sprouting around major cities from Seoul and Tokyo down to Melbourne. Korean incumbent KT now has 7,000 hotspots, and is aiming to reach 16,000 by the end of the year. But is...

Internet traffic growth slows. (Insight).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Asian Internet traffic growth is slowing, down to 126% last year from 200% in 2001, according to an RHK study of access network usage. RHK said broadband users contributed the largest portion of traffic in the Asia-Pacific region,...

Web services will rule. (Insight).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Web services will become the dominant distributed computing architecture in the next ten years, says IDC, predicting it will create drive a total software, services, and hardware opportunity in the U.S. alone of $21 billion by 2007. By the...

MMS take-off in 2007. (Insight).(Multimedia messaging services)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... MMS users will send more than 2 billion messages a month in 2007, or 25 billion a year, according to the ARC Group. The main function of MMS will be as a content delivery mechanism, according to the new report, which forecasts that nearly...

Handset prices the key to MMS. (Insight).(Multimedia messaging)
March 1, 2003... Multimedia messaging will quickly evolve into a mass market product, thanks to decreasing handset prices, predicts the Shosteck Group. The biggest part of MMS traffic will be user-generated content, pictures created and shared with other...

Beijing: Chinese mobile users hail the Year of the Goat by sending 7 billion text messages during the first week of the lunar new year. (Asian telecoms this month).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Beijing: Chinese mobile users hail the Year of the Goat by sending 7 billion text messages during the first week of the lunar new year, according to China Mobile and China Unicom.

Hong Kong: PCCW denies a Financial Times report that it made a $3.9b takeover bid for Cable & Wireless, only to be rejected, and sends a letter to the London Stock Exchange saying so. (Asian telecoms this month).(Pacific Century CyberWorks Ltd.)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Hong Kong: PCCW denies a Financial Times report that it made a $3.9b takeover bid for Cable & Wireless, only to be rejected, and sends a letter to the London Stock Exchange saying so. Then PCCW tells the Hong Kong Stock Exchange that it did...

Hong Kong: UTStarcom is considering a Hong Kong public offering to meet demand from Asia-based fund managers. (Asian telecoms this month).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Hong Kong: UTStarcom is considering a Hong Kong public offering to meet demand from Asia-based fund managers. UTStarcom, which supplies limited mobility gear to customers in China, is listed on the Nasdaq, but some fund managers based in Asia...

Bangkok: Hutchison Whampoa launches its new CDMA mobile network, covering Bangkok and 25 of Thailand's 76 provinces. (Asian telecoms this month).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Bangkok: Hutchison Whampoa launches its new CDMA mobile network, covering Bangkok and 25 of Thailand's 76 provinces. Around 100,000 subscribers are expected in its first year of operations.

Canberra: a government inquiry into splitting Telstra into two companies is scrapped after the opposition Labor party dismisses the idea as too costly and too complex in terms of compensating existing shareholders and various tax and regulatory issues. (Asian telecoms this month).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Canberra: A government inquiry into splitting Telstra into two companies is scrapped after the opposition Labor party dismisses the idea as too costly and too complex in terms of compensating existing shareholders and various tax and regulatory...

Hobart: Telstra awards a multi-million dollar contract to Alcatel to construct a second Bass Strait fiber cable connecting Tasmania and Victoria, spanning approximately 250km. (Asian telecoms this month).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Hobart: Telstra awards a multi-million dollar contract to Alcatel to construct a second Bass Strait fiber cable connecting Tasmania and Victoria, spanning approximately 250km. The Bass Strait 2 link is scheduled to be completed in July.

Kuala Lumpur: Celcom begins talks intended to help 8% shareholder Deutsche Telekom sell out of the company. (Asian telecoms this month).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Kuala Lumpur: Celcom begins talks intended to help 8% shareholder Deutsche Telekom sell out of the company and smooth the way for Celcom's takeover by Telekom Malaysia.

Kuala Lumpur: Telekom Malaysia seeks international arbitration for its dispute with the Ghanaian government over its 30% stake in Ghana Telecom. (Asian telecoms this month).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Kuala Lumpur: Telekom Malaysia seeks international arbitration for its dispute with the Ghanaian government over its 30% stake in Ghana Telecom, which it is trying to sell back.

Manila: the National Telecommunications Commission says the Philippines' mobile market is primed to grow by one to two percentage points in 2003. (Asian telecoms this month).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Manila: The National Telecommunications Commission says the Philippines' mobile market is primed to grow by one to two percentage points in 2003. The market's mobile subscriber count was 15 million mark at the end of 2002.

Singapore: after two years of losses, Pacific Internet returns to the black with a net profit of $1.7 million for 2002. (Asian telecoms this month).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Singapore: After two years of losses, Pacific Internet returns to the black with a net profit of $1.7 million for 2002 (compared to a 2001 loss of $8.6 million), thanks in large part to growth in broadband sales in Singapore, Hong Kong and...

Singapore: Singapore Telecom reports a 2% rise in quarterly net profit, thanks largely to its Australian unit, Optus. (Asian telecoms this month).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Singapore: Singapore Telecom reports a 2% rise in quarterly net profit, thanks largely to its Australian unit, Optus, posting a maiden profit of A$22 million on strong revenues and cost cutting.

Seoul: Flarion Technologies announces that KT will conduct a field trial of Flarion's flash-OFDM wireless broadband system in Seoul. (Asian telecoms this month).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Seoul: Flarion Technologies announces that KT will conduct a field trial of Flarion's flash-OFDM wireless broadband system in Seoul. The trial will start in April, utilizing the 2.3 GHz frequency band.

Seoul: KT Corp reports a fourth-quarter net profit increase of 31% at $555 million. (Asian telecoms this month).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Seoul: KT Corp reports a fourth-quarter net profit increase of 31% at $555 million, driven by a rise in broadband users and one-off gains from the sale of its stake in rival SK Telecom.

Seoul: SK Telecom chief Pyo Moon-soo sticks by the cellco's controversial 2.5 trillion won ($2.1 billion) capex program for 2003 that calls for 30% more spending than 2002 to pay for 3G upgrades. (Asian telecoms this month).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Seoul: SK Telecom chief Pyo Moon-soo sticks by the cellco's controversial 2.5 trillion won ($2.1 billion) capex program for 2003 that calls for 30% more spending than 2002 to pay for 3G upgrades, but says the company will be "flexible" on 3G...

Taipei: the Ministry of Transportation and Communications prepares for its next share auction for incumbent Chunghwa Telecom. (Asian telecoms this month).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Taipei: The Ministry of Transportation and Communications prepares for its next share auction for incumbent Chunghwa Telecom. It plans to auction up to 5% of Chunghwa Telecom.

Tokyo: Japan Telecom, two-thirds-owned by Vodafone, says it is in talks with US investment fund Ripplewood. (Asian telecoms this month).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Tokyo: Japan Telecom, two-thirds-owned by Vodafone, says it is in talks with US investment fund Ripplewood and others on selling its fixed line operation as part of a larger effort by Vodafone to streamline its corporate structure.

Tokyo: Japanese fiber-optic cable manufacturer Furukawa Electric files a lawsuit against Corning Cable Systems International, a Corning Inc affiliate. (Asian telecoms this month).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Tokyo: Japanese fiber-optic cable manufacturer Furukawa Electric files a lawsuit against Corning Cable Systems International, a Corning Inc affiliate, for infringement of its optic-fiber technology patent for eight-core-type tape wire.

Sydney: SingTel Optus says it will sell some broadcasts assets in its National Digital Media Centre in Sydney to pay-TV partner Foxtel for an undisclosed sum. (Asian telecoms this month).
March 1, 2003... Sydney: SingTel Optus says it will sell some broadcasts assets in its National Digital Media Centre in Sydney to pay-TV partner Foxtel for an undisclosed sum. Optus also plans to outsource services provided by its Video Operations Centre.

Wellington: Telecom Corp of New Zealand reports a 4% drop in quarterly net profit, but the results beat expectations on cost cuts and a turnaround at its Australian unit, AAPT. (Asian telecoms this month).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Wellington: Telecom Corp of New Zealand reports a 4% drop in quarterly net profit, but the results beat expectations on cost cuts and a turnaround at its Australian unit, AAPT, which shows positive cashflow for the first time since TCNZ bought...

Tokyo: local cellcos object to plans by the telecoms ministry to give fixed carriers rather than cellcos the right to set rates for calls from fixed to mobile phones. (Asian telecoms this month).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Tokyo: Local cellcos object to plans by the telecoms ministry to give fixed carriers rather than cellcos the right to set rates for calls from fixed to mobile phones. NTT DoCoMo says the plan would cut its profit by more than 100 billion yen...

Tokyo: NTT DoCoMo president Keiji Tachikawa admits the cellco will have a hard time meeting the company's target of 320,000 FOMA subscribers by the end of March due to handset delays. (Asian telecoms this month).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Tokyo: NTT DoCoMo president Keiji Tachikawa admits the cellco will have a hard time meeting the company's target of 320,000 FOMA subscribers by the end of March due to handset delays. DoCoMo had 152,000 FOMA users at the end of December.

Ericsson. (movements).(Names Carl-Henric Svanberg as its new chief executive)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Ericsson names Carl-Henric Svanberg as its new chief executive. Svanberg, who heads the world's biggest lock-maker, Assa Abloy, replaces Kurt Hellstrom on 8 April. The Wall Street Journal reports that chief operating officer Per-Arne Sandstrom...

Qwest Communications International will restate about $2.2 billion in total revenues. (movements).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Qwest Communications International will restate about $2.2 billion in total revenues, more than it had originally anticipated, for sales of optical network capacity, equipment and other services in 2000 and 2001.

WorldCom is to cut another 5,000 jobs, or more than 8% of its work force, and trim annual costs by $2.5 billion in an effort to emerge from bankruptcy. (movements).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... WorldCom is to cut another 5,000 jobs, or more than 8% of its work force, and trim annual costs by $2.5 billion in an effort to emerge from bankruptcy. WorldCom plans to cut interconnection fees to local carriers by 12.5% and sales and general...

Nokia Networks will cut 550 staff, or more than 3% of its workforce. (movements).
March 1, 2003... Nokia Networks will cut 550 staff, or more than 3% of its workforce, due to falling market demand.

Fiber-optic cable manufacturer Corning will discontinue its wavelength switch and blocker product lines. (movements).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Fiber-optic cable manufacturer Corning will discontinue its wavelength switch and blocker product lines, and close a California plant, as part of its plan to return to profits this year.

The European Commission recommends that EU countries force telcos to open their networks to competitors in a scheme to boost broadband take-up by promoting more competition. (movements).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... The European Commission recommends that EU countries force telcos to open their networks to competitors in a scheme to boost broadband take-up by promoting more competition. The proposal excludes cable operators for the time being.

Qualcomm sets a first-ever quarterly dividend and announces a $1 billion stock buyback program. (movements).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Qualcomm sets a first-ever quarterly dividend and announces a $1 billion stock buyback program effective until February 2005.

Lucent Technologies retires $729 million of preferred securities and other debt. (movements).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Lucent Technologies retires $729 million of preferred securities and other debt in exchange for 285 million shares of common stock.

The mobile technology patent infringement trial between InterDigital and Ericsson is postponed until 15 May. (movements).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... The mobile technology patent infringement trial between InterDigital and Ericsson is postponed until 15 May. The suit, in which InterDigital accuses Ericsson of infringing on its patents, is currently in its tenth year.

Norway's Transport and Communications Ministry says it will auction two more UMTS licenses and push back the deadline for 3G rollouts. (movements).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Norway's Transport and Communications Ministry says it will auction two more UMTS licenses and push back the deadline for 3G rollouts for current license holders Telenor and NetCom by around 15 months.

Cisco Systems posts a record quarterly profit despite a dip in sales. (movements).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Cisco Systems posts a record quarterly profit despite a dip in sales, but Cisco expects sales in its fiscal third quarter, ending in April, to be flat or even down as much as 3% from the second quarter.

Level 3 Communications posts a narrower quarterly loss of $313 million. (movements).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Level 3 Communications posts a narrower quarterly loss of $313 million, and completes its purchase of bankrupt rival Genuity.

Motorola says it will press ahead with its offer to purchase the 26% of Next Level Communications it does not already own and believes its $30 million offer is "fair". (movements).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Motorola says it will press ahead with its offer to purchase the 26% of Next Level Communications it does not already own and believes its $30 million offer is "fair". Next Level files suit, alleging Motorola tried to coerce minority...

A federal judge gives WorldCom permission to sell a luxury yacht building yard that the company had foreclosed on as part of move to collect on loans it made to former chief executive Bernie Ebbers, who bought the shipyard in May 1999 for $14 million. (movements).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... A federal judge gives WorldCom permission to sell a luxury yacht building yard that the company had foreclosed on as part of move to collect on loans it made to former chief executive Bernie Ebbers, who bought the shipyard in May 1999 for $14...

The bubble revisited: as bandwidth carriers come out of bankruptcy, are they writing a new chapter in the industry, or just reliving the old one? (Cover Story).
March 1, 2003... Picture the scene: too many global carriers, all with similar business models, unleashing huge amounts of bandwidth onto a saturated market and chasing the same wholesale and MNC market. What happens? They not only drive themselves into the...

Get on the grid: the Internet is going back to its decentralized and collaborative roots with grid computing. Grid isn't new, but it's set for serious enterprise commercialization this year, and after that--grid-based Web services. (Internet).
March 1, 2003... In the aftermath of the dotcom meltdown, cooler heads have known all along that the Internet would survive the shakeout, even if most of the flyby-night vaporware start-ups that popped out of the woodwork during the boom didn't. After all, the...

Bandwidth trader: got minutes to sell? Need to buy some? There are 3,000 bandwidth exchanges to turn to, but Arbinet-thexchange has been doing it for ten years in the teeth of plunging prices and carrier meltdowns. "We had two-tenths of 1% bad debt in 2002," president and CEO Curt Hockemeier tells global technology editor John C. Tanner. (One-To-One).
March 1, 2003... Telecom Asia: Last year, Arbinet Launched CreditWatch--how has that worked out so far? Curt Hockemeier: We do the clearing, billing and settling on the backend of the transaction after people place their buy and sell orders on the...

Integrated UMTS chipset. (Premiere: latest products and services).(Texas Instruments)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Texas Instruments has made available a new integrated UMTS chipset and reference design. The TCS4105 chipset comprises the TBB4105 digital baseband processor, which supports W-CDMA up to 384kbps, as well as Class12 GSM/GPRS. It also...

Ethernet controllers for next-gen migration. (Premiere: latest products and services).(TranSwitch Corp.)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... TranSwitch Corporation has introduced a new family of Ethernet controllers to speed up the migration of existing ATM, frame relay and SONET/SDH deployments to next generation networks. The first two devices, Envoy-8FE (TXC-06840) and...

SHDSL business gateway. (Premiere: latest products and services).(Efficient Networks )(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Siemens-owned Efficient Networks has released the Siemens se5954 SHDSL business gateway for small and medium businesses. The gateway combines the functions of an SHDSL modem, managed 8-port 10/100 Base-T Ethernet switch, firewall, VPN...

Wireless multi-service gateway. (Premiere: latest products and services).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Philips Electronics has unveiled what it says is the semiconductor industry's first wireless broadband residential gateway designed to support both 802.11b and DECT. It incorporates multiple applications in a single reference design,...

160Gbps single-chip switch fabric. (Premiere: latest products and services).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... The TCF16X10 single-chip cell-switching fabric from TeraChip is now available. Based on TeraChip's patent-pending memory-based technology, the TCF16X10 is a low-power 15W chip integrating 64x3.125Gbps SerDes transceivers in a 0.13-micron...

26.5 GHz spectrum analyzer. (Premiere: latest products and services).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... IFR has unveiled a new 26.5 GHz spectrum analyzer that increases the bandwidth of the company's 2394/2399A spectrum analyzer series. The portable analyzer weighs only 13 kg and comes with a large 6.4-inch color LCD display. It is suited for...

Extended voice portal. (Premiere: latest products and services).(Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, has extended functionality of its Genesys voice portal, a voice application platform for delivering enhanced self-service applications. These include support for SpeechWorks OpenSpeech Recognizer,...

In search of telecom's Next Big Thing? The downturn is changing the way the telecom industry adopts new technology. (Telecom Corporate).
March 1, 2003... New technologies come and go in the telecommunications market, but rarely in unpredictable fashion. The life cycle of any new technology can be summarized in three words: Hype. Bust. Reality. As the entire industry suffers from the...

Time to plan for end of termination rents. (Telecom Planet).
March 1, 2003... A global regulatory assault on one of the last telecom monopoly cash cows--mobile termination--has begun. Britain's regulator OFTEL and the UK Competition Commission were first off the mark in January issuing a decree that the termination rates...

Alive. (Backpage Briefing).(Web use continues to rise)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... ALIVE: Two years after Forrester pronounced the "death of the Web", a new study by Ipsos-Reid shows that Web use is continuing to rise--even in the US. The survey found that 72% of American adults had used the Web in the previous 30 days, well...

Cooperation. (Backpage Briefing).(SingTel and SingTel-led cable system C2C complain about difficulties of working with i2i)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... COOPERATION: There are partnerships. And there are partnerships. Having built a portfolio of alliances around Asia, SingTel must now draw out those elusive synergies. Easier said than done: executives at SingTel and SingTel-led cable system C2C...

TV. (Backpage Briefing).(Furor surrounding Telstra's loan of digital TVs to senior government leaders)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... TV: Another furore surrounding Australia's Telstra, this time over the loan of digital TVs to senior government leaders. Both Prime Minister Howard and Communications Minister Alston have admitted receiving a A$10,000 ($5,9600) plasma screen...

Following suit. (Backpage Briefing).(Cisco Systems' lawsuit against Huawei Technologies)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... FOLLOWING SUIT: Cisco's lawsuit against Huawei Technologies, pitting the world's largest router supplier against China's biggest telecom vendor, has prompted massive interest in tech and legal circles. Cisco last month claimed that Huawei...

Interference. (Backpage Briefing).(Ultrawideband draws flak)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... INTERFERENCE: Ultrawideband, the super-powerful short-range radio technology, continues to draw flak as it makes its way to the market. This time it's the satellite broadcast industry which is complaining about UWB interference. The...