John Linton I read an article in the Asian edition of TIME on the flight from Colombo to Singapore yesterday on the progress that Telenor (Norway's national telephone company) has been making in providing mobile telephone and data over 3/3.5G in Bangladesh, Malaysia, Thailand and Pakistan. (the article was on pp 39 and 40 in the May 5 2008 edition). My interest was twofold as Telenor is apparently going to offer similar services in Sri Lanka 'shortly'.
Some of the figures quoted were quite startling:
1) Revenue in the last financial year of $A19 billion (from a population of 5 million in their home country but with over 7 billion coming from Asia and another 6 billion from their neighbouring countries - Sweden and Denmark and five Central and Eastern European countries).
2) Over 50 million subscribers in their four Asian countries.
3) Telenor pioneered and provided the pre-cursor of GSM in 1983 and made GSM the standard in Norway in 1993
4) Telenor had double the penetration of mobile phone users per head of population of the next most used countries in the EU (France and Germany) by 1999 and that 'saturation' drove them to use their GSM expertise to set up in so many other countries.
It's worth reading if you can find a copy.
What was even more interesting, and surprising, to me was the fact that you can get high speed HSPA data services in Sri Lanka at faster speeds and lower costs than you can obtain them in Australia.
They have an 'entry package' of 1.5 gbytes for the equivalent of $A15.00 a month.
Sri Lanka Telecom offers speeds of up to 7.2 mbps down and 1.98 mbps up for approximately $A10.00 per gbyte for a 15 gb package and 3.6 mbps down and 384 kbps up on a 5 gbyte package........
.......amazingly they don't then make additional downloads prohibitively expensive to generate some 'profit' on their give away package pricing. Excess data is charged at 1 cent per megabyte.
And there's no catch to the set up pricing - a choice of M3 modem or data card for less than $A80.00 and an activation charge of $5.00 for the SIM.
And there's also no coverage 'catch' (at least according to the material I received which says "usable practically anywhere in the island of Sri Lanka).
It seems to give the lie to "Australia's vast spaces and sparsely populated areas drive up the cost of data services......." type verbiage which is the stock rebuttal to "but other countries have.....". I don't think the population spread in Sri Lanka and the topography is any less challenging that that of Australia and I would say for certain the terrain/population difficulties in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand and Malaysia also rank right up there on the scale of impossible terrains to deal with and with population's spread right through those impossible terrains.
Not that it matters in Australia today as the three major mobile companies all claim to be able to by the end of 2008 provide HSPA to 98% of Australia's population. It will now be interesting to see if they can deliver the data at a speed of 7. 2mbps and priced at $A10 per gigabyte with excess usage priced at 1 cent a megabyte.
Apparently there is no reason why that can't be done given that it is now available in a country such as Sri Lanka.
It's a pity that TeleNor isn't bidding for the current federal government tender - Australians in remoter areas of the country might be able to get high speed internet at the same prices that third world countries pay for their high speed internet today rather than pay some Telstra monopoly/Labor incompetence sky high price in 5 years time.