Friday Review: Facing East

Friday Review: Facing East
By Mary Lennighan, Total Telecom, in Beijing and Nick Wood, Total Telecom
Friday 16 April 2010

Hong Kong's CSL, China's ZTE set out to inspire the global mobile industry, plus a look at Germany's and India's spectrum auctions.

The eyes of international travellers are firmly focused on Northern Europe at present where a sizeable cloud of volcanic ash emanating from an eruption in Iceland has closed airports in a number of countries.

Indeed, as it stands, I have no idea how much longer I will be staying in China after Britain's airspace was closed on Thursday for the first time in living memory. A brief stopover in Beijing could turn into a lengthier visit unless air travel to the U.K. resumes in the very near future.

But while I'm keen to head westwards, the mobile industry is taking its inspiration by looking in the other direction, at least according to Hong Kong mobile operator CSL and Chinese equipment maker ZTE.

"People are looking at what's going on here [in Hong Kong]," Christian Daigneault, chief technology officer at CSL told journalists on Thursday as he detailed the telco's ongoing LTE trials and commercial rollout plans.

Daigneault added that to date around 80 global mobile operators have visited CSL to learn how it is progressing.

CSL CEO Tarek Robbiati believes his company has a lot to teach other operators. In particular, the telco has adopted a data pricing model that has been taken up by rival Hong Kong-based operators and could prove useful for foreign players faced with growing data usage but static revenues.

CSL offers flat-rate pricing for mobile data, but segments its packages by speeds. Its cheapest service, for example, is a consumer offering that costs HK$307 per month and offers a download speed of up to 3.6 Mbps, while at the top end, business customers can get speeds of up to 21 Mbps for HK$706.

"Everybody [in Hong Kong] copied the speed-based pricing concept," said Robbiati, adding that he sees it taking off elsewhere.

"The real challenge for us is to see whether customers really value the speed experience...If they value the speed experience, we win," he said.

However, speed-based pricing only makes sense once an operator has rolled out high-speed mobile data, and most operators are some way behind CSL.

The telco launched its Next G network in March 2009. It can offer speeds of up