The NetEvents Asia Pacific Service Provider VIP Summit in Singapore last November was an opportunity for service providers and telecommunication professionals to share their experiences and ideas with industry peers, discuss advances in telecommunications technologies, the viability of new telecommunication business models and potential for collaboration.

Immediately following that, the UK-based Net Events International also held the Asia Pacific Press Summit where these industry professionals and experts presented their findings, opinions and experiennces to members of the information and communications technology media from across the region.

“The year 2009 has been a challenging for the industry, as telecom revenues have slowed with operators worldwide having cut capital expenditure for 2009,” said Ted Dean, president and managing director of BDA China in his opening keynote address. BDA advises investors in the telecommunications, media and technology sectors in China and India, as well as other high-growth segments.

Planned investments by major carries in Europe were down by as much as 34% in 2009 over 2008, in Latin America down by as much as 25% and by as much as 3% down in Japan. However, recovery and opportunity are on the horizon, especially in emerging markets, in wireless and in services & applications.

“However, the Asia Pacific was the fastest growing in terms of capital expenditure and wireless services and the only region which has been growing,” said Dean.

The Asia Pacific (APAC) accounted for 41% of all capital expenditure (CapEx) in 2008 compared to 29% in the Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region, 8% in Latin America (LatAm) and 22% elsewhere. CapEx in the Asia pacific grew by 16.2% in 2008, followed by 10.7% in LatAm and and 9% in EMEA, while it ws down by 3.8% elsewhere.

Also, only APAC experienced year-on-year growth in wireless sales across five consecutive quarters from Q1 2008 through Q1 2009, while EMEA was mostly down by as much as 10% in a quarter, while growth in sales in LatAm went progressively down from strong growth of around 50% in Q1 2008 to a drop of around 50% in Q1 2009, while sales were down in all of these five quarters and by as much as over 20% in Q2 2008.

The shining stars were China and India, which respectively added between 7 and 10,5 million and between 7.8 and 15.6 mobile subscribers each month from July 2007 to Septembet 2009 despite the economic crisis and the bankruptcy  of Lehman Brothers in September, 2008.

In a particular case. growth in China Mobile's revenue in China slowed but remained positive and grew by 8.9% from 195.5 billion yuan overall in the first half of 2008  to 212.9 billion yuan in the first half of 2009.

The mobile industry is undergoing a paradigm shift caused by the explosion of always-connected devices with thousands of consumer and enterprise applications based on 3G & 4G technologies.

This changes user behaviour and mobile broadband expectations, thus causing a shift from operator-driven to a services-driven business models.

Findings by 3G Americas show that mobile voice traffic worldwide has doubled between March, 2007 and May, 2009, while in the same period, packet data traffic has increased by 18 times.

According to an IDC report of February, 2010 sponsored by Juniper Networks, this trend is due to several factors.

One of them is that at the time there were a total of 570 3G networks of either Wideband CDMA or CDMA2000 technologies worldwide and the resultant economies of scale has resulted in declining device and service costs, which is a key factor which has resulted in an accelerated pace of 3G service uptake, especially during the preceding 12 to 18 months.

The first driver was the growth in the number of notebook and netbook PCs with mobile broadband connectivity to the Internet, with the pressure these bandwidth-hungry users put on the network rising exponentially.

On average, a typical 2G or 2.5G handset user would would consume tens of megabytes per month but the typical netbook or notebook user would consume from two to three gigabytes per month and this is expected to increase even further with higher bandwidth, fourth-generation technologies such as Long Term Evolution (LTE).

Smartphones

Adding to that is the growth in the number of smartphones, which already consume 300 MB per month and growing. However, while individually each smartphone consumers less than a PC, their greater numbers put pressure on networks.

According to IDC, sales of smartphones in the last quarter of 2009 was up 39% year-on-year  and grew by 15% overall in 2009, while the market for all devices grew 11% in the fourth quarter, 2009 and actually declined 5% over the whole year. So the general trend is towards use of data intensive phones such as the Apple iPhone, the BlackBerry and new products such as the Motorola Droid.

Malaysians need to move up the value chain, we've often been told by our country's leaders and policy makers over the last 10 or so years.

As lower skilled assembly and manufacturing jobs, which have provided over 30 years of employment opportunities are moved away to lower wage countries due to globalisation and open borders, it's no longer enough for Malaysian workers, technicians and engineers to simply engage in the production of finished products but need to be able to design them and develop the underlying operating system which drives them.

So instead of just assembling and marketing products such a DVD, digital music, digital video players, mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and the many more devices, appliances and equipment, we now have to know how to develop the embedded operating systems and applications which drive them and give them their seeming intelligence, and there's been an increasing interest from  working engineers and technicians to upgrade their skills and local colleges and universities to incorporate embedded systems development in their curricula.

For example, eACT Technologies has been providing short courses in embedded software development in Malaysia since 2004 and and has trained over 250 engineers in industry to upgrade their skills and obtain certification, according to its technical director Suresh Santhana Krishnan.

“There's lots of interest today, from local universities and colleges to implement embedded development labs, such as Intel Lab and Arm Lab on campus and we are in discussions with local institutions to conduct diploma courses in embedded development,” he said.

As for a career, there are many opportunities for outsourced development work from overseas.

Hands-on workshops

eACT itself conducts four and five day hands-on training workshops on Embedded Linux & Device Driver development and  Windows CE Product Development Using PDA Platform respectively, with the Linux and Windows CE 6.0 workshops alternating each month between Kuala Lumpur and Penang, subject to a minimum attendance of five at each city.

Windows CE is used in consumer devices such as GPS navigators and a few smartphones, and while it's more popular on industrial or professional devices which don't need the lifestyle features found on consumer smartphones, upon which Windows Mobile derived from Windows CE is more common but competence in Windows CE development provides the foundation for Windows Mobile development.

At the same time, there are very few straight embedded Linux phones, upon which Linux-based OS such as Android are gaining prominence, so why does eACT not conduct workshops on Android instead?

"Gaining competence in embedded Linux development provides the basis for people to develop on Android," said Suresh. "Moreover, there's not much information yet available at the kernel level development on Android. Currently their architecture SDK available on http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html.  Their architecture is not open yet, so they entertain users to develop applications on their SDK, while Linux lets developers go right down to the underlying core. We however are planning Android courses in the near future,” he added.

Also, while Windows CE is a proprietary OS, Microsoft lets beginners download a 90-days free evaluation of Windows CE 6.0 and its application programming interface (API) is made available to developers who register with the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN).

FriendlyARM

Students are provided with a FriendlyARM Mini 2440 “target board” - ie. a single-board computer with a touchscreen, interface cables and software which they can purchase and take home after the workshop and continue with their experimentation and development.

Measuring 100 x 100 mm, the FriendlyARM Mini 2440 is powered by a low-cost, 400 MHz Samsung S3C2440A ARM9 processor, comes with Flash memory with BIOS, electrically erasable programmable read only memory (EEPROM), external SD card slot, three RS-232 serial ports, USB ports, 3.5mm stereo audio output jack, audio input & condenser microphone, 10/100 Mb/s RJ-45 Ethernet port, real time clock with battery, buzzer, 20-pin camera interface, LCD interface, touchscreen, power supply and it's compatible with Android, Linux 2.6 and Windows CE5 and 6 OS.

The Linux workshop teaches students about the kernel, booting and kernel initialisation, basic Linux common set, system calls, embedded OS, the GNU toolchain, how to build a kernel, experimenting with the 2.4 and 2.6 kernels, setting up the host and target boards, introduction to the ARM architecture, loading the boot loader, configuring the board, installing the application, debugging it using the board, compiling and configuring the kernel, Linux device driver using X86, introduction to Linux device drivers, debugging techniques and lab sessions.

The Windows CE workshop involves an introduction to the platform builder IDE, customising the OS design, configuring Windows Embedded CE sub-projects, managing catalogue items, building and deploying a runtime image, editing build configuration files, analysing build results, deploying a run-time image on the target platform, a lab session on building and runing a run-time image on the emulator, generating a software development kit (SDK), customising a board support package, configuring memory mapping of a BSP, developing device drivers, implementing a stream interface driver, configuring and loading a driver, implementing an interrupt mechanism in a device driver, an exercise in driver code examples, debugging and testing the system, configuring the run-time image to enable debugging and testing the system using the CE test kit.

Prerequisites for the workshops are a knowledge of C or C++ programming languages and a knowledge of Windows CE or Linux, while an engineering or information and communication technology background is preferred but not necessary, so basically any technically competent person in these fields, with or without a formal qualification can participate.

Fees are RM6,000 for each of the courses, plus RM400 if the students wants to take the FriendlyARM kit home. Discounts are available to educational institutions, as well as individuals and companies can claim the cost of these courses from the Human Resources Development Fund (HRDF).

THE acceleration of content development and how it can complement the growth of broadband penetration in Malaysia was the topic of the P1 Expert Net panel discussion at Packet One Network's (P1's) auditorium in Petaling Jaya on 28 January, 2010.

The panellists comprised Pete Teo, a musician, actor and producer of the P1 sponsored  Malaysian Filmmaker Showcase – the 15 Malaysia project http://15malaysia.com; Hasnul Hadi Samsudin. head of the MSC Malaysia Animation and Creative Content Centre (MAC3), James Chong, chief executive of ruumzNation which operates and manages ruumz, Malaysia's first fully-fledged social networking site at www.ruumz.com; Kanchei (Ken) Loa, a research fellow with the Institute of Information Industry, Taiwan; and moderated by Michael Lai, P1 chief executive officer.

Absent was Harold Thwaites, associate professor and dean of the Faculty of Creative Multimedia, Multimedia University.

“Malaysia's household broadband penetration now stands at 32% and one of the ways to further encourage broadband adoption is to have relevant and exciting content catered to specific interests of different people. Therefore it's important to create more local content that complements the varied lifestyle of Malaysians to bridge the relevance gap and the momentum will help Malaysia realise its goal of 50% household penetration by the end of this year,” said Michael Lai.

Founded in 2001, Singapore-based Utiba's vision is, “Empowering everyone to make mobile payments,” based on the belief that soon, mobile users can pay for goods and services using their mobile handset, to anyone, anywhere and any time only by knowing the recipient's mobile number.

In his book, Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Indian entrepreneur, consultant and management expert Coimbatore Krishnarao (CK) Prahalad and a Paul and Ruth McCracken distinguished university professor of Corporate Strategy at the Ross School of Business of the University of Michigan proposed that the engine for the ext round of global growth and prosperity would be the world's five billion people who live on less than US$2 per day, since the viability of this market had already been proposed by various private and state funder enterprises.

Not only has this “bottom-of-the-pyramid” (BoP) market delivered profitability for enterprises but their economic inclusion had resulted in spurts of growth at macro economic levels as well.

The inspiration behind Utiba's initiatives and solutions, is its capability to reach out to the BoP and provide them with the means of financial and economic inclusion, such as by enabling micro finance institutions to service small farmers and entrepreneurs in remote areas.

It's mobile payments technology has enabled foreign workers and emigrants to transfer funds to their family and friends, whenever they want to at a fraction of the cost of conventional systems.

Today, Utiba's clientèle comprises 26 mobile network operators, banks and government agencies across over 15 countries.

These include Maxis M-Money in Malaysia, Globe Telecom in the Philippines, Airtel, BSNL, Shyam & SmartTV in India, Hutch & UGen in Sri Lanka, Indosat& Axisworld in Indonesia, Mobifone & mService in Vietnam, Telcel in Mexico, Emtel in Mauritius, Citicell in Bangladesh, True in Thailand, Telma  in Madagascar and others.

By Orcun Tezel

Advanced network security solutions are now being deployed as much for sophisticated policy enforcement as external attack prevention.  This is, of course, a natural extension of what network security products have always been designed to do: ensuring that only legitimate network packets reach only appropriate destinations in the network. 
What constitutes legitimate network activity, however, is becoming increasingly complex, reflecting more sophisticated policies, business initiatives, and compliance requirements that are stretching the capabilities of today’s enterprise networks.  As a result, organizations are rethinking their network security requirements and looking to build policy awareness and enforcement into the fabric of the network.

Initially, network security policies were relatively simple to design.  The primary objective was to partition the “trusted” internal network and systems from the “untrusted” external world.  Securing the network perimeter could be implemented after the high-performance internal network had been laid down with a relatively small number of appliances and policy rules, depending on what internal services needed to be made available to external users (usually web access, email, and remote access for external employees).

Security policy frameworks are becoming more complex to deploy given the higher connectivity and sophistication of the network architecture and access needs due to:

1.Prevalence of insider threats from intellectual property theft to improper access of mission critical financial data.
2.Malware (viruses, worms and Trojan horses)  on the internal network, which have become more sophisticated.
3.Presence of more untrusted users and systems on the internal network, such as partners and contractors. 
4.Increase in compliance, regulatory and risk management initiatives, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA in health care or the payment card industry (PCI)

In response to these challenges and the internal nature of threats, organizations are moving from a secure perimeter to a Secure Network Fabric where networks are built to reflect the pervasive need for security and policy enforcement throughout the network. The key components are:

Automated Remediation – Blocking network threats in real-time by intelligently identifying illegitimate network packets or activity and dropping the offending traffic without manual intervention or creating an alert for every security incident as is the typical case today.

While the focus so far is on delivering 6 Mb/s connections to homes but providing a good user experience will require carrier Ethernet all the way into homes but Malaysia is not yet fibre rich right now, according to Andrew Coward, Juniper Networks vice-president of Service Provider Marketing & Partnerships.

Ethernet is a protocol which defines a packet structure which can be delivered over Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH), Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) or other such legacy networks but it's costly per bit, hence the need to move to a full IP-based network.

“After all, 80% of a carrier's spending is operational expenditure, so if this can be reduced to say 60%, there would be more to spend on development,” said Coward on the sidelines of the recent Carrier Ethernet World Asia Pacific Congress in Kuala Lumpur.

Carrier Ethernet can deliver all legacy services such as VPN, fixed broadband access, mobile voice and wireline voice, as well as new data services such as streaming video, digital TV, managed telepresence, online ads, mobile advertising, location-based services, mobile data services, wireless broadband services, CDN and cloud computing – to name a few – which to be delivered cost effectively must ride on a shared packet based IP network.

These new services are expected to experience 20% CAGR (compound annual growth rate) according to a December 2008 Yankee Group report, while the legacy services mentioned above have very low single digit CAGR at best, so the challenge is to transition the network and the business model to take advantage of  service opportunities and offset declining revenue and margins from more traditional services.

However, Ethernet was designed as a best-effort service within a local-area network (LAN) environment but such shared bandwidth generally results in a poor experiences, especially when viewing streaming videos, so the challenge is to take the cost advantage of Ethernet combined with proper controls to enable high quality service and a good user experience.

Broadband users are a demanding lot, with an attitude expressed in the chorus of the song by the rock band Queen, I want it all, which goes, “I want it all, I want it all, I want it all, and I want it now.”

The anarchistic Internet culture which expects everything for free and takes advantage of unlimited access data packages to the hilt by doing peer-to-peer downloads all day and night long – caring only for their rights and not those of other users, when mobile broadband networks speeds are intended to enable fast transient traffic, such as web access and e-mail downloads.

With the Internet content and services such Voice-over-IP, search engines, video streaming portals and music downloads going mobile and a minority of users hogging available capacity, bandwidth traffic is increasingly exponentially, whilst revenue remains flat, according to a 2009 report by analyst firm Frost & Sullivan, and all this puts operators at risk of being forced to become a dumb pipe.

Moreover, voice revenue is flat or falling and additional data revenue cannot compensate for it, and all this makes it difficult for operators which differentiate themselves according to price.

This puts mobile broadband operators in difficult position as it costs operators money to provide sufficient bandwidth in their network to sustain the load and to maintain their networks, whilst providing quality service at an affordable price without losing money.

It's been found that 10% of users consume 90% of operators' resources, which puts them in the same position as a restaurant serving a buffet at a fixed price to customers at an ancient Roman banquet.

According to ancient Roman philosopher and statesman, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, these decadent and extravagant Roman banquets, including during the time of Julius Caesar, involved feasting on multiple courses of food and copious amounts of wine non-stop all day and night long, and to continue eating, the guests vomited up what they had eaten, sometimes on the floor for slaves to clean up and they continued eating more and repeated the process.

With such customers, the buffet restaurant would lose money and have to raise prices or go bankrupt, which is a similar dilemma faced by mobile broadband operators due to that 10% of users with insatiable appetites for content. So operators are forced to either raise the prices of their unlimited packages, throttle certain types of traffic or impose monthly fair use limits.

Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) had been commissioned by the Malaysian Communication and Multimedia Commission (SKMM) to conduct a survey, The Adoption, Appropriation & Impact of Mobile Phones Among Malaysian Society, with funding by the SKMM Spectrum Research Collaboration Programme.

The term “adoption” refers to why a user adopts a technology and why they choose a specific make and model. “Appropriation” goes deeper to undersatnd how they adopted the technology and adapted it to satisfy their different purposes and how the use of the technology – in this case a mobile phone --  as intended by the designer, is actually used by end-users.

As for social impact, the survey looks into the both the positive and negative social impact of mobile phones, both intended and unintended.

The study is headed by Prof. Dr. Rose Alinda Alias, dean of UTM School of Graduate Studies, Skudai, Johor in partnership with Nor Zairah Addul Rahim, Assc. Prof. Dr. Naomie Salim, Assc. Prof. Dr. Azizah Abdul Rahman and Dr. Norafida Ithnin of UTM in collaboration with Assc. Prof Dr. Jennie Carroll of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), Australia, Assc. Prof. Dr. Nor Shariza Abdul Karim, Dr. Norshidah Mohamed and Dr. Murni Mahmud of International Islamic University Malaysia (UIAM) and and Dr. Shamsul Anuar Mokhtar of Universiti Kuala Lumpur (UniKL).

We had attended the lectures by Dr. Rose Alinda and on The Impact of Wireless Technology (ie wireless broadband) on Malaysian Society by Associate Prof. Datin Dr. Norizan Abdul Razak of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi at the SKMM Spectrum Research Lecture Series at SKMM Auditorium in Cyberjaya on 21 August, with Associate Prof. Dr. Nik Rushdie Hassan of University of Minnesota as facilitator.