Has the telco industry forgotten basic services?

Zatni Arbi ,  Contributor ,  Jakarta   |  Mon, 02/25/2008 12:02 PM

Nanang, a plantation worker from a secluded village in the interior of Kalimantan, is familiar with cell phones -- he has used one from time to time whenever a decent signal has been available.

"We have had a stronger signal on our cell phones ever since the tower was built," Nanang said, referring to a turnkey tower that Ericsson was building right inside the palm oil plantation where he works.

His comment surprised Lucky Mirza, Ericsson Indonesia's marketing and communications manager. While it was true the construction of the tower had been completed, the radio equipment had not yet been installed.

Nanang is certainly not the only one in Kalimantan who has been waiting to be served by a cellular network that provides a stronger signal and reliable connection. For Nanang and millions of others like him around the world, a cellular network is a breakthrough that will change their lives.

"It seems that we as an industry may have made a mistake until recently," said Jan Signell, President of Ericsson Southeast Asia.

"We focused too much on fulfilling the demand of sophisticated users in urban areas and forgot the basic services that villagers in remote areas had been deprived of," he said during an interview on the sidelines of the recent 3GSM Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

MOBILE PRESENTATION: Ericcson's Radio Base Station RBS 6000, unveiled at the 3GSMA World Mobile Congress in Barcelone, is 25 percent the size of its predecessors, has double capacity and supports multiple standards such as GSM, GPRS, EDGE, WCDMA, HSPA and LTE. (JP/Zatni Arbi)

There was a lot of truth in what Jan said. The industry has been introducing new technologies that cater to the more demanding lifestyle of the urban rich, while the masses in rural areas are still dreaming of cheap voice communication services.

Indeed, two of the main themes during the annual event this year were mobile broadband and mobile TV delivery.

Villagers do not need these services. What they need is voice communication and perhaps texting capability. It's too bad that discussions on providing these basic services often tend to get drowned among loud announcements of high-end, entertainment-related technologies.

But the situation has been changing in the past year or so. You may recall the photo of a low-powered base transceiver station (BTS) that accompanied my report on this annual event two years ago. The energy efficient BTS was developed by Ericsson, and it could be powered by solar panels and biofuel-based electric generators. The Swedish company, known for its pioneering wireless technologies, has actually been addressing the needs of remote areas hitherto not touched by the power grid.

There have been several ongoing experiments of low power stations around the world involving Ericsson, including Northern Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia.

In the village of Sukaladi in Riau, Sumatra, Telkomsel has put up one of the first energy efficient, solar-based macro BTSes in Indonesia using Ericsson's RBS 2111. A similar experiment is also being run in Cambodia.

"We contributed our BTSes to Kofi Annan's Millennium Development Goals project in Africa, and the infrastructure dramatically changed the lives of the people there," said Jan.

During the annual event, the company introduced the latest generation of its radio base station, the RBS 6000. It requires smaller space -- 25 percent of what its predecessor used. It consumes 20 to 65 percent of the power required by the previous generation, but it has twice the capacity.

"Better still, it supports multiple standards from GSM, EDGE, WCDMA, HSPA and even LTE in a single package," said Mikael Back, Ericsson's VP for Portfolio Management, during a press conference.

Here in Jakarta, many of us have been using 3G and HSDPA USB modems for some time. We are quite familiar with the dongles, which we even use for our desktop PCs.

Ericsson also launched an embedded HSPA module for mobile devices including notebook computers. In Barcelona, it was jointly announced by Ericsson and Lenovo that the next generation ThinkPads -- my favorite notebooks -- would have the module already built in. The benefit is of course that we no longer have to carry around and risk losing the USB dongle.

On the pickup of HSPA, Jan Signell was upbeat. Despite the proliferation of Wi-Fi and the talk of WiMAX' imminence, HSPA adoption in Southeast Asia -- including Indonesia -- has been growing at an increasingly fast speed.

"Users are gradually shifting to wireless broadband to get online," said Jan, highlighting the fact we now do a lot more things over the Internet today than before, including uploading and downloading large volumes of user-generated content, playing multi-player games and blogging.

Carl-Henric Svanberg, Ericsson's president and CEO, shares Jan's optimism. "Currently, there are 174 commercial HSPA networks in 76 countries," he said during an earlier press conference.

Every month, it is estimated there are some 6.5 million new 3G WCDMA and HSPA subscribers. It is also projected that, by 2010, 71% of mobile broadband connections will use HSPA.

While access to technology has advanced greatly, there are at least two big hurdles that impede the speed of adoption. First, in many countries, the backbone capacity is still limited. We can have high-speed mobile broadband technologies, but if the toll roads that would carry the data are not available, the high-speed access technologies don't mean much. Clearly there is some homework to be done.

Another constraint is the pricing. Jan's position -- and I completely agree with him -- is that operators should introduce flat rates.

"We've seen that the countries that have adopted HSPA the fastest are the countries where flat rates are used," he said.

Personally, I prefer flat rate charging because it makes my monthly bill predictable.

As for the future of mobile broadband, it is becoming clear that Long-term Evolution-System Architecture Evolution (LTE/SAE) is the route. During the four-day event, Ericsson demonstrated a live between two LTE handheld mobile devices. The data rates can be up to 160 Mbps. Compare that to the HSPA's 14.4 Mbps maximum data rate. The technology, which many have categorized as 4G, is predicted to be commercially available next year.

This year's 3GSMA Mobile World Congress (previously named the 3GSMA World Congress) was the biggest ever, with 55,000 registered participants and visitors. Most of the booths -- or stands, as they are called in La Fira, where the event took place -- were so packed with people that, most of the time, it was difficult for me to really have a look at the many new handsets and mobile devices on display. I just can't imagine what it will look like next year.

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