At 437 million mobile phone users, China offers “the world’s most promising market for wireless value-added services (WVAS),” Ovum said Thurs. In 2010 WVAS will bring $11.5 billion-plus in Chinese revenue, up 48% from 2006, the analysts said. Messaging still will dominate in 2010, but mobile music and TV and other new media services will alter the market, it said. Growth of WVAS in China could surge on a recent VAS policy change, access to converged terminals, strong economic growth, rising demand and increased foreign investment, Ovum said. Launch of 3G and perhaps WiMAX also could boost WVAS. Uncertainties remain, however, analyst Kevin Lee said: “The most imminent issue is the conflict between the telecom and broadcast regulators on mobile TV services, where the State Administration of Radio, Film and TV requires mobile TV services to obtain broadcast licenses but didn’t approve any licenses for mobile telcos.”
Exports to China
Space Systems/Loral last week unveiled a 2nd commercial satellite manufacturing contract, for ProtoStar. The Fri. deal followed Loral’s Thurs. announcement it will build Nimiq 5 for Telesat. The ProtoStar contract will have Loral modify the former ChinaSat 8 satellite, originally built for China Telecom Broadcast Satellite and China National Postal & Telecom Appliances, it said. ProtoStar, a Cal.-based venture aiming to broaden DTH video and satellite broadband services in the Asia-Pacific region, bought the satellite from the Chinese entities in 2006. Loral will bring the craft out of storage, tweaking it for ProtoStar power and footprint needs, officials said. The satellite is the first in a fleet of several ProtoStar intends to launch to support Asian partners looking to offer more digital video options, Loral said. The craft will be renamed ProtoStar 1.
An NAB official’s invocation of Chinese human rights abuses to argue for expansive broadcaster rights in the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) broadcast treaty is the “worst form of scaremongering,” a spokesman for Public Knowledge told us. Ben Ivins, NAB senior assoc. gen. counsel, told treaty critics to “be careful what you ask for” in pressing for limitations on broadcaster rights, lest countries like China use the rules to censor the free flow of information (CD Jan 4 p5). The spokesman said that sounded like an ad hoc argument made only in response to an NPR official’s concern that overly broad rights could themselves limit the outlet’s ability to disseminate news. “The implication, I think, is that countries like China may throw open the doors to signal piracy if broadcasters don’t censor themselves or broadcast required propaganda,” the spokesman said: “Yet nothing prevents China from doing this already.” The point of limitations on broadcaster rights is to ensure that “you don’t have overlapping sets of property rights resulting in liability for honest actors,” he added. Other claims by Ivins are suspect as well, the spokesman said. Retransmission rights in the U.S. are limited to competing broadcasters and cable companies, not copyright holders and end users, the opposite of the draft treaty’s thrust, he said. Countering Ivins, the spokesman said there are “a variety of examples” of difficulties encountered by owners of home networks in moving legally acquired content between devices, such as the Load ‘N Go case over the legality of “place-shifting” DVDs.
China Mobile and Google will provide mobile and Internet search services in China, they said. Google technology will power “mobile search” on China Mobile’s Monternet WAP portal, enabling users to sift sports and entertainment news, games, ringtones, images, videos and books. The service, launched in beta in Dec. 2006, soon will be available “broadly,” the companies said.
Critics of the World Intellectual Property Organization’s revision of its broadcasting treaty (CD Aug 4 p7) are finding monsters under the bed and erasing U.S. law in their warnings, an NAB official told opponents Wed. Speaking to a roundtable organized by the Copyright Office and Patent & Trademark Office, Ben Ivins, NAB senior assoc. gen. counsel, said “the imagination truly runs wild” in harms traced to the latest draft.
AT&T’s Internet traffic from Singapore to Tokyo and Hong Kong to Tokyo has been slowed by the undersea cable damage caused by the earthquake near Taiwan (CD Dec 28 p1), the carrier told us Thurs. The quake and its aftershocks have also hampered AT&T voice traffic from the U.S. to several areas in Asia, a spokeswoman said, including Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Brunei. About 125 AT&T business customers are impacted, she said. “AT&T is working around the clock along with other undersea cable coalition members to fully restore all services as quickly as possible,” an AT&T statement said: “Since the issues were first detected about 2:30 p.m. EST Tues., several key trunk lines serving the region have been successfully repaired.” AT&T officials said they couldn’t estimate the cost of the damage or give a repair timetable. Taiwan’s largest carrier, Chunghwa, will lose about NT$100 million (U.S. $3 million) in revenue because of the disruption, a spokesman told us Thurs. It will cost Chunghwa NT$50 million (U.S. $1.5 million) to fix the cables and rent back-up capacity from other operators, the spokesman said. Of the 4 cables that Chunghwa owns, 3 were damaged, he said. Chunghwa rerouted its traffic to the APCN and APCN2 lines after the quake hit the China-US and Sea-Me-We 3 cables Tues., but 2 aftershocks broke APCN and the southern section of APCN2 early Wed., a Chunghwa statement said Thurs. “Currently, only the northern sections of Sea-Me-We 3 and APCN2 are available to accommodate the traffic,” the firm said. Chunghwa is using unaffected cables and satellite circuits to plug gaps, it said. By Thurs., voice capacity was up to 75% between Taiwan and the U.S., and 57% between Taiwan and China, Chunghwa officials said. Four cable ships have been dispatched for repair work to begin Mon, the firm said Thurs. The work is supposed to take 3 weeks, it said.
Telecom and Internet service providers scrambled Wed. to reroute traffic widely disrupted across the Asia-Pacific region by a powerful earthquake off Taiwan’s southern coast. People in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and elsewhere awoke to find themselves without voice and data services after a 7.1 Richter scale quake damaged at least 8 undersea cables in the region, telcos said.
China’s mobile video market will surge in 2008 thanks to the Beijing Olympics, ABI Research said Thurs. By then there will be 32 million-plus mobile video users, about 27% using broadcast technology and the rest unicast streaming, the report said. China this year released 2 handset-related standards. Technology based on digital audio broadcasting likely will be the first phase of Chinese mobile multimedia broadcasting standards development; it will precede upgrade of the country’s proposed terrestrial digital multimedia broadcasting standard, the report said. Lack of content, still a problem for mobile video in mainland China, will be resolved when more companies get handset TV service provider licenses. Mobile video streaming, available now in Hong Kong, will have 715,000 users in 2008, ABI predicted.
Verizon Business will build and maintain a next- generation undersea optical cable system linking the U.S. mainland and China, it said. The Trans-Pacific Express will be financed with $500 million-plus from a consortium that includes China Telecom, China Netcom, China Unicom, Korea Telecom and Chunghwa Telecom of Taiwan and Verizon. The system will be able to carry 62 million phone calls at a time, more than 60 times the capacity of the cable now linking the countries, Verizon said. The project is to begin Q1 2007 and be completed Q3 2008.
CompTel chided the FCC for not enforcing interconnection access in comments filed last week with the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR). CompTel also asked USTR to step in. The filing listed complaints about foreign govt. failures to abide by international telecom trade agreements. CompTel said competitive carriers still have trouble abroad promptly getting local access lines from dominant carriers promptly with no discriminatory terms. That’s also a problem in the U.S., CompTel said, since FCC policies shut off network access and let incumbent providers “act as network gatekeepers.” USTR should exercise its authority as the enforcer of trade obligations and provide guidance to the FCC, CompTel said. The filing, submitted for an annual report, said China made no progress toward reducing market barriers the past year; China has no telecom law or independent regulatory authority and imposes burdensome licensing requirements on foreign carriers, CompTel said. Germany has created new problems through a law that violates World Trade Agreement obligations, the filing said. Other countries with telecom trade barriers include Australia, Colombia, France, India, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Mexico, Spain and Sweden, it said.