PEO TV on the Go - through your Mobile - MediaWatch

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SLT launched OTT entertainment platform - Media communication

Media release - SLT launched OTT entertainment platform

http://insite.slt.com.lk/News/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=408

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FW: TRCSL ask mobile operators for spectrum use Google Loon Project - CeylonToday/MediaWatch

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SLT Film Hall-"Pravegaya" - NOW Streaming ONLINE!

 

 

 

 Follow us on      Dial 1212 Visit www.slt.lk for more info 

 

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HTC and SLT Mobitel launch new smartphone range - MediaWatch

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SLT to become a global point of presence (PoP) - TheIsland/MediaWatch

SLT to become a Global PoP with Double-Landing Station, Matara, Sri Lanka

-        Making Sri Lanka the Digital Hub of the region.

-        Adding Sri Lanka to the world's POP network includes Singapore, Europe and USA.

-        Strengthening the country's status as the most preferred IT-BPO/Data Center destination.

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WhatsApp, Focusing on Product & Services, Not Technology - HBR research/MediaWatch

WhatsApp Grew to One Billion Users by Focusing on Product, Not Technology

At a time when digital technology is transforming one industry after another, large companies tend to view innovation and disruption as the result of breakthrough discoveries or technological wonders. They look at the explosive growth of companies such as WhatsApp or Instagram and assume that true innovation is the realm of digital wonks and ambitious entrepreneurs. The corollary, of course, is "we don't know how to do that."

But when Mubarik Imam, head of growth and partnerships for WhatsApp, told the company's extraordinary story to a group of high-level executives and technology experts at a conference in Palo Alto last year, the narrative was conspicuously free of digital breakthroughs or "aha!" moments. For those who hoped to hear the secret of how digital wizardry turned two disgruntled Yahoo veterans into overnight billionaires<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/meet-silicon-valleys-newest-billionaires-the-yahoo-alums-who-co-founded-whatsapp/>, the real story was an eye-opener. Transforming a relatively simple idea into a $19 billion windfall, it turns out, was more about solving problems with the tools at hand than inventing new solutions from scratch.

For more insights - read online - https://hbr.org/2016/07/whatsapp-grew-to-one-billion-users-by-focusing-on-product-not-technology?
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Building connectivity - Global connectivity & Point of Presence | MediaWatch

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Google's 'Faster' undersea internet cable goes live - Wired/MediaWatch

Global industry 

Google's 'Faster' undersea internet cable goes live

The undersea cable cost $300 million to create and has been in the works since 2014

Internet users in Japan are about to get a speed boost. Google's 9,000km undersea internet cable from the United States to the country has been 'switched on'.

The 60 terabits per second capacity "Faster" cable, first announced in 2014, has been completed and "officially entered into service".

Urs Hölzle, Google's senior vice president of technical infrastructure, said the cable's capacity is "more than any active subsea cable" and is "10 million times faster than your cable modem".

Costing $300 million (£222m), the cable was created after a partnership between six different companies.

As well as Google, China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, KDDI, SingTel, were all involved in the cable's creation and laying. The NEC Corporation supplied the systems behind the cable.

It features a "6-fibre-pair cable and optical transmission technologies" and is based at two locations in Japan – Shima and Chikura – with connections in the US extending the system to hubs on the West Coast of the US.

"This cable is the first of its kind, with multiple colours (100) of light transmitted over various frequencies," Hölzle said in a Google Plus post

"Every ~60km a repeater re-energizes the light as it travels over 9,000km across the ocean floor".

What are undersea cables?

Google's 'Faster' cable is one of a number of undersea cables that connect the world and form a backbone for the internet. The first cable laid across the Atlantic, which was used for telegram communications, was put in place back in 1906.

A global map – in a similar style to London's Tube map – from TeleGeography shows all the undersea cables currently in operation across the world. The majority of all the cables run around individual countries and continents but there are cables that cover longer distances such as across the Atlantic ocean.

The SEA-ME-WE 3 cable that connects Europe to Australia and Asia is the longest cable in the world. The cable has 39 landing points and is 39,000km in length.

In May, Facebook and Microsoft announced they would be building a new underwater cable across the Atlantic. The Marea cable will offer speeds of 160 terabytes per second and is due to be constructed in 2016.

Marea will feature eight fibre pairs, offer speeds of up to 160 terabytes per seconds and will be the first to connect the US to southern Europe - from Virginia to Bilbao.

The cables don't always work as planned though. Currents running through oceans can damage the cables as well as fishing trawlers and anchors being dragged along the sea bed, which is exactly what happened to one connecting Northern Ireland in 2015.

The undersea cable broke and it took a crew of 30 people and a giant robot two weeks to repair the cable.

Source - for online reading 

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SLT - No 1 value for money money broadband internet offers in Sri Lanka - TheIsland/MediaWatch

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SLT to transform homes and offices into `SmartHomes,` `SmartOffice` - MediaWatch

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Mobitel dials for healthcare biz with Rs.733 m bid to buy eChannelling

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SLT wins City & Guilds Lion Awards - CeylonToday/MediaWatch

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SLT offers best value for money Broadband in Sri Lanka - MediaWatch

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Global industry - How to address the telecom skills gap - TotalTele/MediaWatch

Global industry

How to address the telecom skills gap


A Knowledge Network Article by Tim Wright, Director of Technology at The Institute Of Telecommunications Professionals.

Wednesday 07 September 2016

Our industry is facing unprecedented change driven largely by technology which is stimulating end users to demand more of less and to have it all, right now! Processing power, high speed broadband and mobile connectivity, low-cost storage – glued together with software controlled by apps – are the technology drivers. But are there the people with the right skills to deliver these expectations?

Looking first at some of the numbers. In 2014, some 7.5m people across the EU were ICT professionals - that's 3.4% of the total EU workforce - growing on average by 1.2% year-on-year [e-Skills in Europe whitepaper<http://goo.gl/y7U8gg>]. Half of these people work in the ICT sector itself with the rest in the ICT activities of other sectors. The UK had 22% of the EU's ICT professionals – the highest workforce of any EU country. However, the gap between the number of jobs and the demand potential is increasing from a gap of 470,000 in 2016 to 750,000 by 2020. Although a significant number of these vacancies are in Germany, the relatively low graduate figures for the UK suggest that the problem of skills shortages will be severely felt by the UK. The UK could be facing an ICT skills shortage of 160,000 by 2020.

The Daily Telegraph reported (quoting the Adzuna search engine for job ads) that in February 2015 there were over 105,000 jobs advertised in the IT sector in the UK – more than any other sector. Obviously when it comes to telecommunications sector itself, the numbers are smaller – Adzuna is currently listing 6,700 job adverts in telecoms, nearly a third of which are in London, across a wide range of telecoms disciplines.

Although we can feel reassured that there is expected to be an ongoing and increasing number of job vacancies in the telecommunications sector, that is only part of the story … it's the changing nature of the skills that is important brought about by the increasing overlap between IT and telecoms skills. The technical areas where there will be a growth in the demand for skills include mobile, cloud, apps, big data, cyber security, software-defined networking and Internet of things. These technology areas are not separate but are converging.

Advances in computing processing power mean that we can now implement many network functions (such as routing, firewall, content distribution) as an application running on general purpose commercial computing platforms rather than on hardware dedicated to that function – effectively virtualising that function. The connectivity network itself can now be defined by software and controlled by its clients. Such developments have profound implications for the cost base of the network and the ease with which new services can be introduced.

Services are becoming applications running over a network; these services access the network capabilities via an Application Programming Interface. How will these network APIs be defined and how will the applications control the network? What network capabilities will be available for applications to exploit? In many cases, the services and network configurations will be short-lived as new services and network configurations are required. Trends towards software-as-a service, software containers which can be rapidly assembled, used and discarded, the rise of cloud computing and storage, and The Internet of Things will demand extreme agility of the software systems and underlying telecoms networks. They also bring significant security challenges.

For telecoms technicians and engineers, it is this continuing move towards software-based services and networks that presents the big opportunity – and of course challenges. Whilst there will be an ongoing need for the practical skills in installing and managing the physical infrastructure, especially the copper and fibre access networks, an increasing proportion of people need to be skilled in the latest software trends and techniques.

For end-user facing workers, whether they be in a call centre or responsible for on-line ordering, queries or fault management, the key issues are customer experience and service experience – these have long been recognised as vital to retain customers and increase revenue per customer. With regulatory moves to make it as easy for users to change service provider as it is to change their retail bank and with the potential of social media to trash reputations in a matter of hours, the software systems that support workers on the front line, as well as the training of those workers, will be paramount.

It's not just technical skills that are changing … the different ways of working as we progress through the 21st century need to be recognised; working as part of dispersed teams, and short-lived teams established for the duration of a project, requires aptitude in collaboration and communication and of course a flexible approach. The fast moving pace of technology change will require creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, decision-making and continual learning.

The routes to industry are changing too, with more apprenticeship roles offering an introduction to telecoms – a growing area that the ITP has witnessed over the past few years. It runs the only telecoms specific apprenticeship scheme, and has seen the creation of over 60 jobs in telecoms since its 2013 launch. According to CEO, Ann Potterton, "Apprenticeships are no longer regarded as second class degrees, and are providing credible alternatives for young people and employers alike to address the skills gap. These young people can be trained from scratch, which means a new workforce equipped with these emerging skills."

These are huge changes in the IT and telecoms industries - industries that can no longer be regarded as separate. And of course this has significant implications on the skill sets required of our professionals. The ability therefore of our technicians and engineers to create the services in software and to create software to configure the network will be essential.

The Institute of Telecommunications Professionals (ITP) has been running its own apprenticeship scheme since 2013. The programme, launched with support from BT and Virgin Media, has created more than 60 jobs in over 24 organisations which weren't previously able to gain access to telecoms apprentices. It has recently launched a consultancy service to help the industry prepare for the levy. www.theitp.org

Mark Bond, Director, of The Institute of Telecommunications Professionals (ITP) will moderate a roundtable "How can the industry solve the skills gap as we move towards digital business models?" at the Total Telecom Congress on the 4 October 2016. To find out more about joining the discussion, visit the website www.totaltele.com/congress<http://www.totaltele.com/congress> or email rob.chambers@totaltele.com

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Competitor movement - Axiata BHD to trim Dialog stake by 30% - CeylonToday/MediaWatch

Competitor movement, investment & acquisitions 

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Mobitel mCash - Central Finance partner for leasing payments - DailyMirror/MediaWatch

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SLT Powers University of Peradeniya with world class Carrier Grade Wi-Fi Hostpot - TheIsland/MediaWatch

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Dialog's Cumulus partners Zerto - CeylonToday/MediaWatch

Dialog's Cumulus partners Zerto

Cumulus, the cloud solutions arm of Dialog Axiata, has partnered with Zerto to provide Sri Lankan enterprises with real time Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), designed specifically for critical business applications using hybrid cloud solutions.
Enterprises of all sizes are deploying applications on virtualized IT infrastructure of their own and public clouds by adopting a hybrid cloud strategy. The benefits of cloud virtualization include flexibility, scalability and cost effectiveness. Near synchronous replication helps customers who are adopting cloud platforms achieve true business...

...continuity for their critical applications hosted at their production data centres in the event of any service outage.
Zerto's award winning Virtual Replication platform is the industry's first hypervisor-based replication solution for tier-one applications, which is a software-only, enterprise-class replication solution, purpose-built for virtual environments. This enables enterprises to simplify business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) and reduce storage costs. Zerto Virtual Replication is able to deliver orchestration and automation of the entire site-to-site disaster recovery process within a few clicks.

"Zerto Disaster Recovery as a Service is the ideal blend of what customers require to protect their important applications and data," says Dialog Axiata PLC Head of Broadband and Fixed Telecommunication Services Navin Pieris. "Customers can rest assured, knowing that their workloads, no matter the type, size or scope, will be protected and recovered quickly with minimal impact on operations in the event of a disaster or outage," he adds.

Further Cumulus, with its ISO 27001:2013 certified state-of-the-art data centres and cloud offerings backed by the world's leading technology providers, offers affordable and unparalleled bundled cloud solutions to its customers.
"We developed Zerto Virtual Replication to transform the way that organizations think about and execute their BC and DR strategies, and provide IT resilience for the evolving needs of technology," said Zerto Managing Director, A.P.J. Andrew Martin. "Our technology is rapidly becoming the Dr. standard in cloud environments. With Zerto Virtual Replication, BC and DR is part of the virtualized infrastructure, making it easy for Dialog Axiata to offer DRaaS capabilities to its clients."

About Zerto

Zerto is committed to keeping enterprise and cloud IT running 24/7 by providing innovative, simple, reliable and scalable business continuity software solutions. Through the Zerto Cloud Continuity Platform, organizations can seamlessly move and protect virtualized workloads between public, private and hybrid clouds. The company's flagship product, Zerto Virtual Replication, has become the standard for protection, recovery and migration of applications in cloud and virtualized data centres.

About Cumulus

With Cumulus, Dialog Axiata PLC provides a local cloud space for all ICT requirements, including products, solutions, and services to suit the need of large enterprises and small and medium businesses. The portfolio encompasses virtual IT infrastructure, enterprise storage and data backup, messaging solutions, development platforms, device management, business applications, productivity solutions, and managed security solutions.

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Sri Lankan market crowded, Asian telcos under pressure in 2017: Fitch Ratings/MediaWatch

Sri Lankan market crowded, Asian telcos under pressure in 2017: Fitch Ratings

Nov 15, 2016 (LBO) – Sri Lanka continues to be a crowded market with five operators serving a population of 21 million and set for consolidation, Fitch Ratings said in a statement.

"We expect industry consolidation in India, Indonesia and Sri Lanka, as weaker telcos exit the market or seek mergers and acquisition to strengthen their competitive position," Fitch said.

"The Sri Lankan market looks particularly crowded and ripe for consolidation. Debt-funded mergers and acquisition could threaten the ratings of acquirers in these markets."

The full statement follows

Fitch Ratings-Singapore/Sydney-13 November 2016: Fiercer competition and rising capex needs will put pressure on the credit profiles of most Asian telcos over the next year, says Fitch Ratings. We have a negative outlook on the telecoms sectors in India, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines. Korea, Indonesia, China and Sri Lanka are all on stable outlook.

Competition is likely to intensify in India, Singapore and Malaysia, with new entrants poised to offer cheaper tariffs to poach customers from incumbents. Competition could be the most intense in India, where a well-capitalised new entrant, Reliance Jio, is offering free voice and text services and cheaper data tariffs than the incumbents. We expect the blended tariff to decline by 5%-6% for Indian telcos. In Malaysia, the fixed-line market leader, Telekom Malaysia, is making a move into the wireless market, which will prevent a recovery in the revenue of wireless incumbents next year. Finally, Singapore will soon auction sufficient spectrum to allow the entry of a fourth mobile network operator.

Rising competition will add to pressure on revenue, which Fitch expects to grow by just 0-5% in most Asian telco markets in 2017. Data usage will continue to rise strongly, but most telcos are pricing data in such a way that increased usage is not translating into similar revenue growth. The trend of falling data tariffs and the substitution of data for voice and text will continue in most markets. Fixed-line and international long-distance services are in a structural decline. China is the only market where we expect higher data usage to translate into growth in average revenue per mobile user.

Weak revenue growth will result in a hit to the profit of most Asian telcos. EBITDA margins are likely to shrink the most in the Philippines and India, where telcos still derive the majority of their revenue from voice and text services. Chinese and Korean telcos' profitability will remain stable, reflecting weaker competition and lower marketing and handset subsidy costs. Chinese telcos will benefit further from lower tower lease rental costs.

Rising capex needs will mean that many Asian telcos will have minimal-to-negative free cash flow next year. Thai, Philippine and Indian telcos are likely to have the highest capex/revenue ratios, at around 28%-30%, as they strengthen 4G networks in response to fast-growing data consumption and the rising importance of network quality. In contrast, Chinese telcos' capex could decline by 10% as their 4G development cycle has peaked.

We expect industry consolidation in India, Indonesia and Sri Lanka, as weaker telcos exit the market or seek M&A to strengthen their competitive position. The Sri Lankan market looks particularly crowded and ripe for consolidation. Debt-funded M&A could threaten the ratings of acquirers in these markets.

Among the Fitch-rated Asian telcos, Singapore Telecom Limited (A+/Stable), Telekom Malaysia Berhad (A-/Stable), Reliance Communications (BB-/Stable), Global Cloud Xchange (B+/Stable) and PT Tower Bersama Infrastructure Tbk (BB/Stable) have low ratings headroom.

Fitch has published Outlook Reports for nine Asian telco markets: India, Sri Lanka,

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