High speed wireless technologies finally begin making an impact in Malaysia.
As the year 2007 draws to a close, it’s time to take stock of the major happenings and non happenings, predictions which came to pass and those which did not.
The big question the MW Team asked the industry in our January issue was, “Will 2007 be the Year of 3G?” (in Malaysia that is).
A 3G Year?
Not surprisingly, mobile operator Celcom and network equipment supplier Ericsson were confident in the uptake of 3G mobile communications technology. Ericsson attributed it to the rollout of HSDPA, an evolved version of 3G (or 3.5G), being rolled out by Celcom and Maxis, as well as new 3G licensees MiTV and Time dotCom.
Motorola too felt 2007 would be the “year of 3G” as the technology had “matured tremendously,” though it felt 3G would become mainstream by mid-2008.
While analyst firm, TNS Global Techology didn’t have figures for Malaysia, its 2006 survey of 16,000 people across 29 other countries, including in the Asia Pacific found adopting 3G was of a low priority among most of them, with 25% citing high cost as the major deterrent.
Well back then, entry level 3G handsets such as the Nokia 6151 and the LG U8500 were hovering around the RM1,000 mark at RM999 and RM1.099 respectively according to the MW Buying Guide, while by November, 3G phones such as the Nokia 6151 was down to RM699, the same LG U8500 now cost a more affordable RM919, while the Motorola RAZR V3xx HSDPA phone costs RM909, while prices of GPRS and EDGE phones had fallen as well.
3G phone prices thus have become less of a deterrent in 2007. However, having a 3G phone doesn’t mean one also has a 3G account and in October, an industry player, NGC Systems said it expected the number of 3G subscribers to reach one million by the end of the year, which is still puny at less than 5% of the 21.2 million overall mobile subscribers by the end of June, the latest available figures from the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission.
So, while the number of 3G subscribers didn’t take off like wildfire in 2007, it certainly more than doubled within the year, helped no doubt by the aggressive promotion of HSDPA wireless broadband services by Maxis and Celcom, which introduced attractive 384Kbps data plans packages costing RM68 per month, as well as higher speed packages.
The year also saw the brand-launch in September of Malaysia’s third 3G operator, U Mobile (formerly MiTV Networks) and the testing in November of its Mobile Live TV service among 5,000 selected users.
At the same time, Maxis and Astro began mobile TV trials where six TV channels, CNN, RTM, Astro Sports, Hitz TV, Nickelodeon and Astro Ria, and three radio channels, Era FM, Hitz FM and Mix FM were broadcast to DVB-H enabled mobile phones, such as the LG U900.
In November, DiGi proposed leasing 3G spectrum from Time dotCom till 2018, in return for a shares offer. However, this is pending approval because the Minister of Energy, Water and Communications, Dato’ Seri Dr. Lim Keng Yaik said at the ACM 2007 ASEAN ICT Expo that he had not yet received a request in writing from Time dotCom to allow DiGi to use the 3G spectrum.
Both U Mobile and Time dotCom had earlier announced they would commence 3G rollout by mid-2007 but by the end of November, neither had really got off the ground. U Mobile has begun initial marketing activities as this article is being written, so we could safely expect to see both U Mobile and DiGi roll out 3G services in a big way next year.
Wimax makes its move
A monumental event was the much awaited award by the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) of 2.3GHz broadband wireless access spectrum to Bizsurf, MIB Comm, Asiaspace Dotcom and Redtone-CNX. At the time of writing, none had launched any service yet and are widely expected to do so by the second quarter of 2008.
Another big thing which happened was the launch of iBurst mobile and fixed wireless broadband service in the Klang Valley by iZZinet (formerly MoBif Broadband) in July. This is primarily a broadband Internet access service offering 1Mbps data rates, though it also supports voice-over-IP. MoBif was awarded spectrum to operate the service at 1.7GHz in conjunction with the iBurst International Forum 2007 in Kuala Lumpur in April.
iZZinet has since held a series of roadshows to promote its service and by November, it had acquired about 3,000 subscribers, when we spoke to iZZinet at the ACM 2007 ASEAN ICT Expo.
The 3GSM World Congress was held in Barcelona, Spain in February, with an industry analyst forecasting 480 million new mobile subscribers this year, with the Asia-Pacific region cited as the fastest growing market, with a 27% increase year-on-year.
Push for Content
The MCMC began its push for content development and Roslan Mohamad, its director of Content Development said that at the 3GSM World Congress, they found most TV series were available on phones as well, while in India, producers like Sanjay Gupta were producing 30 minute long ‘mobi-films’ including dramas, love stories, thrillers, comedies and so on.
Besides mobile TV, in Japan, people could download comic episodes to their phones and there’s also user-generated content like uploadable songs and video clips to sites like YouTube, Moblr, MySpace, NothingToxic and so on.
“With 18 million mobile users (including 450,000 3G users) in Malaysia versus 10 million Internet users, mobile will be a huge market for multimedia mobile content,” said Roslan.
Meanwhile, Multimedia Development Corporation chief executive officer, Dato’ Badlisham Ghazali kicked off the Mobile-based Service (mSERVE) track at the eAsia 2007 conference in Putrajaya in February.
The track noted that the worldwide market for educational, entertainment and other content for all types of media and platforms was worth about US640 billion and, while Kamil Othman, MDeC vice-president for Creative Multimedia said that the way forward for mobile content was to tap into some of that for the mobile environment, with streaming videos, games and others on mobile phones.
The 10th of May saw the Minister of Energy, Water and Communications (KTAK), Dato’ Seri Dr. Lim Keng Yaik launch the Mobile Content Challenge 2007 at the MCMC headquarters in Cyberjaya.
The contest jointly organised by Maxis, the MCMC and KTAK aimed to encourage students to develop mobile content and applications, identify and cultivate an innovative mindset among them and to nurture a community of young entrepreneurs who will develop Malaysian content.
Ten teams were shortlisted and Team Focus IT from Universiti Malaysia Sarawak won the top prize of RM30,000 for their Halal Food Product Verification system for Muslims using bar codes in the inaugural Mobile Content Challenge 2007 at Menara Maxis in Kuala Lumpur in October.
Maxis Communications won awards in three categories in the Asian MobileNews Awards 2007 in Singapore on June 20, among 10 mobile operators across the region.
They are Asian Mobile Operator of the Year 2007, Malaysia Mobile Operator of the Year 2007 and its chief executive officer, Dato’ Jamaludin Ibrahim was honoured as Mobile CEO of the Year 2007.
The 1st Asia Pacific Regional Mobile Learning and Edutainment Conference 2007 in Kuala Lumpur in August was a showcase of technologies, applications, methodologies and techniques for providing educational courseware through mobile phones and handheld devices.
Start of the Next-G race
So while our many predictions over the year that 2007 won’t quite be the year of 3G were spot on, there were many encouraging signs that the ‘Voice Era’ is being replaced by the ‘Age of Mobile Data’.
So it doesn’t really matter which high speed mobile technology users adopt, 2007 will probably go down as the year high speed wireless technologies began their take-off.
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