KT: Let's build a common market for digital

In an industry struggling to compete with small, fast-moving competitors, KT chairman Suk-Chae Lee found a ready audience with his call for telcos to create a “global common market” for digital commerce.

It may be old wine in new bottles - essentially calling for a kind of super carrier app store - but his keynote speech also came with some warnings.

KT has suffered a 28% fall in voice revenue and 70% decline in SMS volumes over the last four years. 

“Repair the window before it rains,” Lee said, quoting a Chinese proverb (in Chinese, which went down well). “When the symptoms become reality it will be too late to do anything.”

Lee urged operators to transform themselves into “producers of virtual goods,” or as “enablers" with some claim on revenue share.

He said telcos needed to think globally to enable them to compete against internet firms.  “Why must telcos remain stagnant and in their home market, while Google and Amazon occupy global markets?”

The industry should heed some of the lessons of the failed WAC venture, he said. Operators needed to be light and agile and able to “compete in a unified global market for virtual goods by aggregating our segmented customers bases.”

He says KT has been trying create a global common market, like an app store, which would become a “new way of distributing virtual goods.”

Lee said he's found willing partners in Japanese and Chinese operators and has drawn interest from other operators as well.

KT has created a single all-IP network to cut costs, enabling it to integrate its entire fixed and mobile customer base, which was previously sorted into 'household' and 'individual'. With a unified base of 25m KT is now offering IPTV service over mobile.

Since upgrading to HTML 5 KT has also tried to position itself as platform for small content providers to distribute their services and content.

“We believe this new approach will allow everyone to become a distributor for virtual goods and at a higher level. It may sound like a long way from current reality but the global broadband market is on our doorstep already.”

GSMA: Customers will sell privacy for cash

GSMA's Mobile Asia Expo, the first major telecom event since the Snowden leaks, offers an excellent opportunity for the biggest industry group to take a leadership role on data protection and offer reassurance to the world's 4 billion-odd mobile users. 

GSMA chairman Franco Bernabè did not take that opportunity this morning, despite devoting half of his keynote to security and privacy.

He acknowledged that with the “unprecedented level of information sharing,” privacy was “one of the most debated issues of our time.” He said it was critical that the mobile industry rise to the challenge.

Bernabè did not elaborate on how that challenge could be met, but he did cite Amdocs research which suggests that consumers would be willing to reveal personal data in return for cash.

That insight offered, he turned to his more important role as pitchman for NFC. His security tip: the SIM will protect your data.

Loon aloft: But can it work?

From the team that brought us the driverless car and Google Glass: Google Friday launched some real trial balloons near Christchurch in an effort to bridge the global digital divide.

Project Loon involves placing solar-powered balloons at 20km above the earth’s surface to deliver 3G-like internet bandwidth via the 2.4GHz or 5.8GHz bands, Tech Central reported.

The balloons are clustered in a mesh network so that they maintain connectivity. Each serves a radius of 20 km and a couple of hundred customers simultaneously.

Given that the backhaul must also go over that link, it’s not going to be anything like broadband service, but Google is aiming for the two-thirds of the world who don’t have any internet access.

It will need to be cost-competitive with WiMax, however, which offers broadband speeds across hundreds of thousands of square kilometres from a single tower.  Unlike Loon, Wimax has an industry ecosystem to back it and doesn't need the installation of a ground antenna. Google is clearly betting on the speed and simplicity of building its balloon platform.

Notwithstanding those doubts, who can resist the romance of balloons aloft? Google engineers spent a lot of time picking the brains of NASA and defence boffins to figure out the tech. I’m sure Motorola wished they had that idea instead of tipping $7.8 billion into Iridium.

From the telecom point of view it marks another Google foray into connectivity, along with the Unity cable, the US fibre trials and the oft-rumoured free Wi-Fi scheme.

US, Snowden, China: The world's biggest case of projection?

Amid the blizzard of information in the Snowden affair, the factoid that caught this blog’s attention was the hacking into the Hong Kong Internet Exchange (HKIX).

According to Snowden, the NSA listened into the HKIX, the city’s prime internet exchange, through the internet backbone.

We hack network backbones – like huge internet routers, basically – that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one," he said.

He named one target as the Chinese University of Hong Kong, home to a handful of advanced internet research facilities such as the Hong Kong Internet Exchange, which "essentially connects all of the city's internet access providers to a single infrastructure," the [SCMP] reported.

We don’t know if Snowden is telling the truth, or even if he knows what he is talking about. And while we should probably take most denials on this topic with a large grain of salt, let’s just note that the CUHK said it had not “detected any form of hacking to the network, which has been running normally.”

Maybe, just maybe, “running normally” actually means with a hidden security backdoor already built-in by its router vendor, Cisco. I stress this is pure speculation; there is no evidence Cisco or anyone else provided a key.

But it is striking that that is exactly the kind of behaviour that the US fears that the Chinese will execute on American networks through Huawei.

I can’t help but wonder: when the Pentagon, Congress and the CIA label Huawei a security threat, are we looking at the world’s biggest case of projection?

Unicom fires up staff with inglorious 'bastard prize'

A China Unicom branch has hit on a staff motivational technique missing from the textbooks.

It's been forcing managers who missed targets to don a green vest bearing the word 'bastard'.

It began in mid-May, when the Guilin, southern China, branch announced sales results and awarded 'prizes'  to the three worst-performing units respectively of 'bastard', 'snail' and 'tortoise'. Managers in those departments were required to wear an iridescent green vest displaying the words while on the job.

This got people fired up in ways that management seems not to have anticipated.

The ‘bastard prize’ story (here in Chinese with video)) went viral with predictable results. Even the usually docile local union declared it a “human rights violation”.

Guangxi Unicom issued an apology to staff via weibo early Monday morning. It's not known if it apologised directly to the humiliated managers, or what penalties, if any, were imposed on the geniuses who came up with the idea.