BT’s consumer division (inc. EE and Plusnet) has today set out their approach to this year’s annual price hikes, which will see them increase their broadband, phone and other prices by the contracted CPI of 10.5% plus 3.9% – for a total of 14.4% – for the “majority” of their customers from 31st March. But […]

News

Taiwan’s National Communications Commission (NCC) has approved the mergers of Taiwan Mobile with Taiwan Star Telecom and Far EasTone with Asia Pacific Telecom (APTG)

For many years now, Taiwan has been a highly competitive mobile market, with five national mobile players vying for dominance.

Now, however, this is poised to change, with the NCC today approving two mergers that would see the market shrink from five to three players.

At the end of 2021, Taiwan Mobile announced that it had struck a deal to merge with its smaller rival Taiwan Star Telecom via a stock-for-stock transaction. Not to be left out, around a year later, Far EasTone announced a similar merger agreement with APTG.

The operators were quick to espouse the many benefits for the respective deals, noting the more effective use of combined 5G spectrum holdings, the reduction of unnecessary overbuild, and the energy efficiencies gained by shutting down redundant 3G and 4G base stations.

Perhaps even more important, however, would be the additional scale of the resulting entities, allowing them to more directly challenge the hegemony of incumbent operator Chunghwa Telecom.

Chunghwa Telecom currently dominates the Taiwanese mobile market, recording around 12.42 million reported in September 2022, equating to a market share of over a third. Taiwan Mobile and Far EasTone, meanwhile, are vying for second place, each with a market share of around a quarter. Taiwan Star and APTG are both smaller players, each with around 7%.

As a result, the Taiwan Mobile–Taiwan Star and Far EasTone–Asia Pacific Telecom (APTG) would create three players of comparable market share, ushering in what some are calling a “New Three Kingdoms Era” for the Taiwanese mobile market.

Naturally, such a shift in the Taiwanese market will require significant regulatory scrutiny, with the NCC having already applied various conditions, including 5G rollout targets and assurances that subscriber services would not be disrupted as they were transitioned from one network to another.

Another major hurdle is the issue of spectrum ownership. In the case of Taiwan Mobile, the merger would increase the company’s sub-1 GHz spectrum holdings to 60 MHz – 10 MHz more than the 50 MHz limit imposed on the original spectrum auction. As a result, the NCC has asked the company to return the 10 MHz of additional spectrum to the regulator.

Taiwan Mobile, however, has argued that all the nation’s telcos have exceeded the spectrum holding limits in various frequencies, bemoaning that to return the 10 MHz of bandwidth would have serious consequences for customers.

The NCC’s decision today makes it clear that Taiwan Mobile must have arranged a plan to rid themselves of the excess bandwidth by March 30 this year, whether by voluntarily surrendering it to the regulator, offloading it to an affiliated non-subsidiary, or exchanging it with other another unaffiliated telecoms enterprise.

The two mergers will now await final approval from the Fair Trade Commission.

Want to keep up to date with all of the latest international telecoms news? Click here to receive the Total Telecom daily newsletter direct to your inbox

Also in the news:
Rethinking retail: T-Mobile lays off around 600 retail staff
Exploring a collaborative approach to digital skills development
Israel’s Cognyte embroiled in Myanmar spyware scandal

Low-cost mobile operator iD Mobile (Currys) has announced that they’ve signed a new multi-year extension deal to continue their long-standing Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) partnership with Three UK, which has been in place ever since they first launched back in 2015. The renewed partnership means that iD Mobile customers will continue to benefit from […]

Broadband ISP TalkTalk has moved to try and deflect some of the negative attention they’re likely to get from the confirmation of today’s annual inflation linked price hikes. The provider has done this by shifting the blame for those rises on to the shoulders of Ofcom and their wholesale providers (mainly Openreach). As we reported […]

News

Reports show that smartphone uptake is stagnating, potentially offering a major hurdle for the adoption of 5G services

In the short time since launching 5G services, India’s mobile network operators have been rolling out infrastructure at a rapid pace, seemingly adding new locations almost daily. Reliance Jio’s 5G network reportedly covers 134 cities across India, while rival Bharti Airtel has said that most parts of the country should be covered by the new technology by March.

But while this is undeniably a very exciting time for India’s mobile market – the Indian government recently claimed India to be the largest “connected” country in the world – it belies a rather worrying trend: the number of new internet users in India is declining year-on-year.

According to a recent report by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), India had around 837 million internet subscribers in June 2022, 92% of which were mobile broadband subscriptions.

This represents a growth of just 1% over 2021 figures, which themselves saw only a 4% lift on the total subscriber numbers from 2020.

Compare this with the double-digit growth rates seen in the 2016–2020 period, and it is clear that the Indian internet market is reaching something of a bottleneck.

“The number of new subscribers using the mobile internet per year plunged from pre-Covid levels of 60-70 million to around 35-40 million in CY2022, which has resulted in telcos potentially losing out on around a $300 million additional revenue opportunity, assuming that the extra 25 million new mobile broadband users would have easily generated at least $1 of incremental monthly ARPU for the operators,” said Tarun Pathak, research director at Counterpoint.

The primary culprit for this stagnating growth appears to be the nation’s smartphone market, with high device prices leading to a much slower rate of adoption by new customers.

The smartphone market has been hit severely by the global supply chain crisis, with its reliance on the glacial recovery of the semiconductor industry driving up prices since the coronavirus pandemic began. Last year, market researchers from International Data Corporation estimated that smartphone prices in 2022 had risen 20% on average since the early days of the pandemic.

This is in stark in contrast to the highly affordable smartphones of the 2010s, a decade which saw smartphone user numbers surge from just 34 million to almost 750 million.

Analysts suggest that these supply chain issues are unlikely to improve until the latter part of 2023 at the earliest, leaving it unclear whether India’s new 5G services will be enough to entice new customers to pay a premium for a new smartphone.

Unfortunately for the operators, against the backdrop of higher inflation rates and the global economic downturn it will likely be harder than ever to migrate customers away from their less expensive feature phones towards 5G-capable smartphones.

Want to keep up to date with all the latest news from the global telecoms market? Click here to receive Total Telecom’s daily newsletter direct to your inbox!

Also in the news:
Rethinking retail: T-Mobile lays off around 600 retail staff
Exploring a collaborative approach to digital skills development
Israel’s Cognyte embroiled in Myanmar spyware scandal

Broadband ISP Truespeed, which is deploying a full fibre (FTTP) network across rural parts of South West England, has once again bucked the industry trend of inflicting substantial price hikes on customers by extending their previous price freeze into 2023 and launching a cheaper plan for “financially vulnerable” customers. The announcement simply means that Truespeed’s […]

Most of the major UK broadband ISPs can now confirm how much their annual price hikes will be after the Office of National Statistics (ONS) published their latest UK inflation figures, which saw the Consumer Price Index (CPI) hit 10.5% (up from 5.4% in Jan 2022) and the Retail Price Index (RPI) reach 13.4% (up […]

Credible sources have informed ISPreview.co.uk that customers of UK broadband ISP Plusnet (part of the BT Group) may soon lose the ability to directly add BT Sport TV to their service (this currently costs from an extra £17.15 a month), with the feature allegedly due to then be closed by June 2023. The move to […]

Northern Ireland-based civil engineering firm Viberoptix, which is working alongside ISPs like Fibrus to roll-out full fibre (FTTP) broadband networks in the UK, has launched a new “Fibre Campus” to train new engineers in the specialist skills required to support such work in Cumbria, England. The Newtown Rigg Fibre Campus is located within the former […]

A specialist broadband ISP for the UK education market, Talk Straight (aka – Schools Broadband and Trust IT), has today announced that they’ve acquired Essex based internet and manager solutions provider United Network Technologies (UNT) for an undisclosed sum. Both providers appear to serve some of the same market. For example, UNT already delivers ISP […]