Finally found some time and catch up some news. Some of the news that matters to me enough for me to forward them around.

– ChinaPay Allies With International E-payment Partners

– YeePay Partners with Dang Dang for Online Marketplace

– PacNet introduces @irPower

– (Malaysia) WiMAX tender evaluation is now on

Oh yea, I also found my name on TheStar, Chic to be geek, an interview I did several weeks ago for and I nearly forgot about it. I think it is originally on ST Digital Life.

A question I got quite often lately that is particularly not easy to answer.

The first thing to establish is what do the person mean by WiMAX? Because there are actually two kind of WiMAX, Fixed (802.16d) and Mobile (802.16e). The former is often used in point-to-point links whereas the latter is a point-to-multi-point configuration. Often, both tends to lump the two together as if it is the same but really, other than both are using OFDM, they are very different beast when it comes to deployment.

Fixed WiMAX is established whereas Mobile WiMAX is far newer and less tested in the field. However, the one which got everyone excited right now, e.g. Softbank, Sprint, ClearWire/Intel etc.

The main reason why everyone is excited about Mobile WiMAX is that it has the potential to be a competitor to other broadband last-mile technology, current dominated by DSL and Cable. Vendors are also beating the drum of how good the technology is, how it is able to serve 100mbps in a 10km radius which adds to the hype.

Sadly, that’s it: Hype and Hype.
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Trying to catch up with my RSS but I am going to point out the talk by by James Enck at Telco 2.0 called : Ten things I hate about you.

Some of the ten things he mention arent new, stuff many people including myself have blog about in the last two years but heck, it is James Enck! When he speaks, CNN Money listen.

He said these at a conference full of telco executives at their face : telco can’t innovate and telco shouldn’t try to innovate :-)

I remember one of the things Singtel executives was pretty proud of is how they weather through the dotcom bust*. They love to say “we don’t have R&D. we buy product.” And given that Singtel has done excellently in the last couple of years, I think James Enck wasn’t too far off but damn, it is irriating being a technologist in Singapore trying to get the largest local telco interested in anything remotely in R&D.

Anyway, read his article. No wait, download his speech (torrent). :-) (I will do that when I am back home in Singapore).

* hush hush on C2C…”no really, we didn’t lost money during the dotcom bust”

A bit late but still interesting enough to repost here: Scienists found a way to squeeze more bits onto the copper that it is as fast as fiber. See Copper wire as fast as fiber?

The group hopes that the answer will be found in the use of Dynamic Spectrum Management (DSM) to boost DSL speeds. “The main obstacle for the advancement of DSL technology is the interference (“crosstalk”) generated from different DSL lines that share the same telephone cable binder,” said Professor John Cioffi, Professor of Engineering at Stanford University, a pioneer of DSM research. “DSM is a promising technology for the future evolution of broadband access networks using existing copper infrastructure.”

“Boss,” you begin, “about that $18 billion we just spent? Well, turns out it wasn’t strictly necessary…” – hehe :-)

Just posted a comment on BeyondSG (George Yeo blogs there btw) regarding Iridium. A Porsche for $750 bucks. Re-post here for archive purposes.

I done a due diligence on Iridum for a banker in 2002.

It was already pretty interesting back then. Iridium went backrupted in Aug 1999 and in Nov 2000 was bought out for 25M USD by a group of investor, including Khalid bin Abdula bin Abdulrahman.

In Dec 2000, DoD awarded a 2year 72M USD deal for 20,000 handsets with an option to extend it for 5 years. Supporting DoD alone covers 40% of the OPEX :-)

They only need 60,000 subscribers worldwide to breakeven.

The 66 “birds” (satellites) however have a lifespan designed for 7 years and would expire in 2005. However, the engineers is able to tune it and it is possible to last until 2008 to 2010 and minimual data service could still function until 2015.

The problem for the investors is that when the birds expire, it is going to be expensive excerise to replace them, probably to a tune of 3.5b, altho Boeing mentioned back then they are willing to share the cost.

Anyway, sadly the deal didnt go through. It would be interesting otherwise :-)

Just bought these babies…couldnt wait to blog about them. They are the standalone wifi skype phones from SMC and Netgear. Yep, standalone, ie no need for PC to work. In other words, I can use them in any hotspot. Yeah!!

Original I thought Netgear and SMC are from the same manufacturer as reported in Gimozo but apparently I was wrong. But for those interested, the SMC (and Belkin) version are made by Accton, a taiwanese OEM manufacturer who made these phones in their Shenzhen factory. I wonder who made these Netgear phones.

First impression is the Netgear is better. It is slightly smaller, heavier and feel more like a mobile phone. The SMC/Accton version feel a bit “plastic” (“cheaper”).

Update: Okay, the SMC/Accton phone is buggy as hell. It complains about outdated firmware but the autoupdater dont work. It hangs whenever I tried to make a call out. The Netgear phone however is wonderful! Everything works out of the box! (Altho I wish they were more patient with the DHCP before they complain the network is not available)

In an unrelated note, I saw this piece of news headline at Funan today (I just touched down): “Free Wireless Net access at public area from next year”

It is old news and reported several times. I want to mention it because it is really ironical that I am sitting in Funan, the IT hub in Singapore and, get this, I can’t get any wifi access.

Nope, not even those paid ones I have from Starhub or Singtel. Zip, zero wifi network I can hook up. I tried in all the different spots in Funan and nothing. In the end, I have to use my 3G phone to post this :P So much for “wifi in Singapore”. In KL, at least I know I can get reliable wifi access in any Starbuck.

Whining aside, the significant of “free wireless net access” and the “wifi skype phone” is not lost to me.

However, given that whoever roll out this “free wireless net access” is likely one of the current operators, I am willing to bet that they will be doing their best to stop this happening. It could be as simple as implementing some very seldom used wireless authentication (e.g. EAP-LEAP) or worst, requiring some special authentication software to be downloaded to your PC before you can use the network.

Market is buzzing with rumours that Google is making an offer for Youtube for US$1.6B. As of last checked, there are over 800 news article similar to the one on International Herald Tribune:

The Internet search leader, Google, is in talks to acquire the popular online video site YouTube for about $1.6 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing a person familiar with the matter.

US$1.6b is possible since the shareholders of Youtube had made it pretty clear that they wont sell it for anything less than US$1.5b.

Making it more interesting is the fact that Mark Cuban just made a comment that “Only a ‘moron’ would buy Youtube” on CNN Money a few days ago:

Cuban, co-founder of HDNet and owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, also said Thursday that YouTube would eventually be “sued into oblivion” because of copyright violations.

“They are just breaking the law,” Cuban told a group of advertisers in New York. “The only reason it hasn’t been sued yet is because there is nobody with big money to sue.”

Did Cuban just called Google a “moron”? Perhaps there is a bit of self-interest (Cuban founded HDNet) but not totally baseless either:

“There’s a lot of pirated material on that,” NBC Universal Chief Executive Bob Wright said of YouTube last week. “It will catch up with them. It has a little bit of the Grokster kind of appearance and feel. They kind of know it. We know it.”

Since we are on the topic of Youtube, the whispering among the network engineers (esp. in NANOG) is how much bandwidth Youtube is consuming and the engineering challenges around it. Bill Norton was kind enough to forward me his latest paper title “Internet Video Next Wave Disruption” and there is a nice diagram there.

YouTube, a one-year-old community-based short video sharing service, shared that in February 2006 they are buying transit for 20Gbps of video traffic! Their growth rate, shown graphically below, was documented as 20% compounded monthly!

20% compounded monthly = 891% growth yearly. If they consumed 20Gbps in Feb 2006, by Feb 2007 next year, they would need to buy 178Gbps of bandwidth! Wow!

We almost forgot that Youtube is just a 1.5 year old company. US$1.6B in 18 months, yea, I have to give it to them. *salute*

* Bill Norton was in Singapore on thrusday to present his paper but unfortunately I was not in Singapore then. But he was kind enough to forward a copy of his paper before his talk. Thanks Bill…lets catch up another time.

Someone posted a comment about Predatory pricing on my previous entry on VoIP. The premise is that Predatory pricing to gain monopoly is only a myth and mainstream economists have already rejected Predatory pricing theory.

Read The Myth of Predatory Pricing if you are interested but in short predatory pricing is economical irrational. Selling below cost is not neccessary a predatory pricing practice as sometimes it makes sense to sell below cost anticipating the cost will go down with increase volumes (e.g. Ford Model T). Most important of all, no one has successfully become a monopoly using predatory pricing tactics but there are plenty of failures trying to do so.

Nevertheless, I think the VoIP scenario in my previous entry is a case where “predatory pricing” is logical. In this case, it involves a fixed pricing of a service to the market. That although it also offers the same pricing to its competitors as well as its own subsidary (as mandated by government or fair competition or otherwise), its own subsidary is able to sell the service below the fixed pricing so long its is price above the cost of providing the service. So even though the subsidary maybe making loses, the overall company is still profitable.

Therefore, it is economic rational strategy as the company will continue to be profitable while at the sametime keeping the competitions out of the market.

But what about competition? If the company engages in predatory pricing, wont it forces the competitors to enter the market with their own service? Well, in the first place, telecom is often a coercive monopoly, a monopoly granted by statutory, that one needs to jump through hoops of regulation to break that barrier.

Assuming you can break that statutory barrier, telecom industry is also a natural monopoly. The cost of replicate an incumbent network to provide the same services is often very high with very long return on investments. Given the incumbent already has the infrastructure build out, and that so long it is willing to engage in “low-cost signaling” (a game theory), it could effectively deter investors from financing a competition.

Of course, this would only last until a new technology comes along that brings the cost or the return of investment or both down significantly. Many years ago, Microwave did that once to the (interstate-long-haul) industry creating MCI (what do you think the M in MCI stands for?). And today, it seem like WiMAX is going to do the same for the (last-mile) industry again….the question is which company will it create?

I got the most interesting speaker gift this trip: Flexopower, a portable solar battery charger for mobile phone made by a company in Johannesburg. I havent got the time to play with it but it sound pretty cool. Hey, now I can continue to make phone calls under the hot sun!

I also visited a very cool company by Rael Lissoos called Magnolia Wireless. It was tons of fun talking to Rael and I spend a whole morning with Rael while he drive me around and showed me some of his project. You can find more info about Rael on Esther Dyson’s flickr :-)

Notes on South Africa:

– There are 3 mobile operators: VodaCom, MTN and CellC. VodaCom, is the JV between the incumbent Telkom (51%) and Vodafone (20+%) (how surprising :-) and is the largest operator.

– They have both 2G and 3G network. For value-added service, VodCom offering HSDPA as well as DVB-H with 16 TV channels. Average ARPU seem to be pretty good at around US$50. (versa US$12 for fixed line).

– There are about 25M mobile subscribers out of 46M population.

– Internet access is expensive: on average, people are paying about US$35-40 for dialup access. One of the reasons is that South Africa has the most expensive international bandwidth at US$11,000 per mbps (other countries along the west coast of Africa is paying on average US$2,000 per mbps).

– There is this mobile app called MXit that is taking South Africa by storm. Basically, it an IM client….Er, what so special? Well, SMS cost about US$0.10 each and the data plan for 1mb cost only a small fraction of that. So the obvious choice is to dump SMS and use IM on their phone. According to a SMS Text, MXit now exceed 1M users, growing at 10,000 new users per day! A story of a simple idea at a right place at the right time…

I spend quite a bit of time with Veni Markovski and his wife Elana here in Johannesburg. Veni shared a very interesting story about Internet situation in Bulgaria. There are hundreds of ISPs in Bulgari. Most of the ISPs are small, serving a few block or two. The service plan is 100mbps or 1Gbps broadband for ~US$20.

Yes, read that again: 100mbps or 1Gbps. This is very impressive considered most of them are using dialup 6 years ago. And no, they are not using Fiber to the Home. It is all UTP cables.

The ISP started to move away from dialup in 2002 when the incumbent change to a time-based charging instead of a 2cent per call fee. This makes Internet access via dialup very expensive. The nature evolution is to go to wireless, particularly 802.11b/g like most developing countries. Unfortunately (or fortunately) 2.4Ghz is a licensed band (for TV broadcasting, owned by Rupert Murdoch). So wifi wasnt an option and they went on to do UTP. So right now, they have 60 km of fiber in the country (along the highways) and hundreds of kms of UTP cable in the metro!

How does can it work when UTP requires a repeater every 100m? Well, Veni joked they forgot to read the manual and put a switch every 500m instead. And yes, it works great. For Power, well Power over UTP :-)

Incidently, Veni is really an interesting man, beside his jokes. Veni is an Internet pioneer in Bulgaria and currently on the board of ICANN as well as president of the ISOC Bulgaria.

I was surprised to learn that the current President of Bulgaria, Georgi Parvanov, was a member of ISOC Bulgaria (as well as several Ministers etc). Georgi & Veni grow up together. Georgi was elected in 2002, partly thanks to Internet movement in Bulgaria against the previous President/ex-King. I suppose that makes Georgi one of the few “Internet President”, like Korea President Roh Moo-hyun.

And also his wife, Elana…turns out our path crossed more than we thought. Elana used to work with register.com and we suddenly realized we have a lot of friends in common :-)