I have just returned from attending the latest installment of the Terrapinn event in Dubai. The conference atmosphere was upbeat about the current growth and future opportunities for this region. Although a relatively small conference, the attendees and speakers were of a very high caliber with C-level executives from many of the regional telecom operators presenting during the two days of activities.
Touching on some of the interesting operator conversations over the course of the event revealed some key themes as food for thought:
- Is LTE a luxury item? In a region known for having a large amount of disposable income available to many of its residents, it doesn’t seem like LTE has gotten to the ‘must have’ state as of yet. The cost is still viewed as too high, without an application that drives the purchase yet other than better video streaming.
- Will Africa skip directly from 2G to 4G deployment? Seems like the probability is high for this to happen. Similar to the reason Europe is moving more slowly with LTE — good 3G coverage and available capacity — Africa with the opposite situation seems poised to make a quicker jump.
- The long haul wholesale market is being challenged by unrest in the region along the routes into this market, allowing for different models of market success to take hold, increasing the opportunity for providers from Asia while increasing the challenge for those from Europe. More partner consortiums are entering into play, as highlighted in Turk Telekom‘s discussion.
On the vendor side, there are also a few that stand out:
- Orga Systems smart prepaid utility bills through smart metering allows for customers to better manage their electricity usage and costs through M2M capability.
- Eden Rock Communications SON is currently deployed in T-Mobile US and in trials with tier 1 European operators. What’s interesting here are the customizable SON modules. For each operator, the SON modules can be customized to focus on their specific network management requirements, alerts and systems.
- Carrier IQ demonstrated its ability to dig deeper into the performance of a smartphone. When a customer calls, the agent can really understand not only the network performance, but the device performance down to the battery usage, application performance and coverage level.
- Net-mobile, 87% owned by Docomo, showed off its carrier Google application billing and mobile TV solution platforms. Too much to cover in one sentence, more to come here on another day. But the key takeaway is its solutions allow carriers the ability to offer end users differentiated services under its brand in the application and mobile TV areas.
Some of these topics warrant deeper discussions. Check back soon for some individual deeper dives in separate articles.
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