GSM Asia Pacific

Panel discussion chaired by Mr. Paul Hodges - Director of International Services, CSL Ltd., Hong Kong, China.

Featuring: Mr. Gordon Chang (Director Chunghwa Telecom), Mr. Janaka Jayalath (GM International Business, Mobitel), Ms. Asma Khan (GM International Business, Warid Telecom), Mr. John Murray (Marketing Director, Dhiraagu), Ms. Sylvia Chou (Deputy Director IR, Taiwan Mobile Group), Mr. Amit Mehta (Senior Product Manager, Signalling and Roaming Services, Tata Communications).

Asma: I think the changeover on the operator level is a good thing. Europe is initiating more IOT discounts. After the EU regulation, we have noticed that as the European operators have to maintain a ceiling, they have increased their tariffs for the Asian operators. Lots of Middle Eastern operators are also taking a free ride. In the last 3 months they’ve increased SMS and data charges at least 4 times.

Late last year, usually all the alliances join together and deal only on the group level. Now the good part that I’ve seen in the Middle East is that they are also initiating requests for the non-group operators.

How are the Asian operators cooperating in non-voice services?

Gordon: In these two days we learned something from mobile broadband, etc. All are services focused on data. Are the data services only used in local environment or roaming? Reminds me of a customer who spent $20,000 on roaming services in a week. It was really a bill shock. In our company we have to set a mechanism to set a threshold to notify the customer if their data services are over 10 MB. We can learn something from Eurotariffs. We should have maximum prices for GPRS IOT. The prices in the whole Asia Pacific area should be unified. If we set one price for all GPRS we’re happier and our customers are happy.

Sri Lanka has excellent 3G coverage. How have inbound data revenues been increasing?

Janaka: We’ve seen an exponential growth on data revenues o inbound roaming. How I see it is that basically it is true that the GPRS user and the 3G user, there’s a huge difference between consumption of data. If you apply GPRS rates to 3G the bills will skyrocket. Moving forward, I would suggest that the operator should get into a tier based tariffing. If the high user tends to use more and more 3G they could actually get into a different tier of tariffing.

Do you see any cannibalization of data revenue in voice over IP?

When you really look at VOIP it’s an arbitrage opportunity. You’re actually bypassing the IP based interconnect. What I feel is that it’s always good to have innovation. From an operators perspective can we cannibalize it or oppose it? I think basically we can’t. What operators have done is join and you have a certain part of that revenue coming in. These segments are very different. If you’re a broadband user you wouldn’t necessarily use Skype because you’re paying for data.

Slyvia, there’s still quite a disparity in domestic tariff, roaming tariffs and retail tariffs. How do you see the disparity between domestic and retail progressing?

Sylvia: There’s a big gap… We see the IOT has actually evolved to a stage where the gap has shortened. The rest of the world, however, the gap has gotten bigger. The EU said the tariff charge was too high. At the end of the day, however, they increased the IOT to non-European operators. For our customers roaming into EU, our pricing gets more expensive. I just want to point out one thing. Just put a hypothesis. If all Asian operators say we all increase our IOT, then those EU operators say how can you increase your IOT? Because you increase your IOT. At this point we could negotiate. We spend a lot of effort and time negotiating IOT and by the end of the day we actually return to the same point.

The beauty of telecommunication is to fulfill customer needs. In roaming, however, we actually kill customer need because the price is too high. That’s voice however, but for data almost everyone charges the same IOT.

John, you’re from quite a different market. Is roaming perceived as being a luxury product? How can roaming be made more affordable?

John: Roaming is perceived as a luxury product, historically targeted at the business market. On the back of that, operators have enjoyed enormous profit on it. I find for example in the Maldives, they benefit from inbound traffic from tourists. The bigger challenge for us in SAARC is how do we make roaming affordable for the average customer. Local calls both here and Maldives are very cheap, but roaming is not. Roaming suffers the higher IOT from other operators. For some reason in SAARC we choose to disadvantage each other. The whole ethos behind roaming, making it easier to travel and call, is lost entirely for most of our population. I’d like to see SAARC work together towards the objective of lower IOTs.

What’s been your experience with things like CAMEL roaming in emerging markets?

Amit: In the emerging markets, we’ve seen a high demand for prepaid roaming and CAMEL based services. With it come issues of interoperability and CAMEL testing. The service offering that we’re happy to offer today is CAMEL Exchange which enables operators to overcome issues and fast-track the testing processes. The key challenges are many-fold.

One thing I mentioned was traffic steering, and particularily anti-traffic steering.

Asma: The problem is anti-steering. Steering means you have control over your outbound customer, but you don’t have control over the inbound customer. Operators are not stopping it. The GSMA should either regulate it or take measures against. As a group we have to be very stringent on this.