Wireless connectivity on the roof of the world
Posted: November 27, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 2.4 Ghz, 5.8Ghz, cambium networks, fixed wireless, himalayas, nepal wireless, point-to-multipoint, point-to-point, wireless broadband, wireless connectivity Leave a comment
I’m generally not a big fan of case studies. Usually they consist of unimaginative slices of marketing guff which are little more than glorified sales pitches for this or that technology. However, last week I came across something a little bit different – Cambium Networks technology which is being used to connect village communities 5,000 metres up in the Himalayas.
The project with Nepal Wireless has been steadily growing since 2002 when team leader for the operator, Mahabir Pun, helped build the first proof-of-concept network. Now it consists of 80 point-to-point links for backhaul and 60 point-to-multipoint base stations spread out across the world’s highest mountain range for network connectivity. Thanks to parabolic dish antennae signals can be successfully transmitted as far as 59 kilometres in all but the heaviest blizzards, at a data throughput of 10-14 Mbps and at 5.8Ghz and 2.4Ghz, the firm explained to me.
The technological and operational challenges of building networks in this kind of environment are many, not least the treacherous terrain and weather conditions. Robust, reliable base station technology which is low cost, scalable and quick to deploy is essential. Solar power panels are used to overcome the problem of power supply given the remote base tower locations.
“In Nepal we often have four or five modules on a mast. We synchronise the transmission so the network remains scalable,” explained Cambium’s APAC sales and marketing boss Roy Wittert.
“When you think of wireless broadband, few people think about fixed data connectivity like this.”
The project has now been able to connect some 150 remote villages, enabling education, e-health, local e-commerce and climate monitoring. This is one of those rare occasions when technology can truly change people’s lives for the better.
Oh, and allow Western treckers to jump on Facebook more often.
No shanzhai please, we’re Hong Kongers
Posted: November 15, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: akihabara, feature phone, hong kong, mobile phone, mong kok, shanzhai, shenzhen, sincere podium, smartphone Leave a comment
One of the most frustrating things about being a Hong Kong technology journalist is having people ask you what the next big tech trends are; what kind of weird and crazy gadgets you’ve managed to track down, etc etc.
The truth is, as I’ve discovered over the past 18 months, despite its famously futuristic neon-kissed city-scape Hong Kong is not where you’ll find such weird and wonderful or early adopter technologies. They don’t even really exist in Japan’s famous Akihabara “electronics town” district either – a spot now filled with maid cafes and adult video shops.
The truth is that for pimped out shanzhai goods like these, you’ll need to go to Shenzhen, just across the border from Hong Kong.
This city, and its Chinese neighbours around the Pearl River Delta, has always been the epicentre of cheap, sometimes illegal but usually grey market goods – whether they be recognisable brand name items assembled or sourced from non-official channels, or white box weirdness from tiny makers you’ll never have heard of.
It’s not as if, as I originally thought, there has been a government crackdown on these items in Hong Kong. You see, they’re not technically even illegal – it’s more market driven than that.
“In Hong Kong the government is not banning these products, it’s that the market is not that big,” Frost&Sullivan analyst Lu Shuishan told me. “Some people are willing to pay relatively low prices for shanzhai goods but the market presence of branded products is just bigger.”
People can afford better quality goods in Hong Kong without breaking the bank, unlike in China where an iPhone can cost a months’ salary and grey market versions of the big brands are sought out by virtue of being cheaper, he added.
According to Forrester’s Bryan Wang, Hong Kongers also benefit from buying more of their phones through operators than direct from retail as in China, with two year contracts boosting their affordability whilst locking punters into lengthy terms.
That’s not to say white box goods have completely disappeared from Hong Kong. On a trip to Sincere Podium – a three floor mecca for smartphone fanatics in Mong Kok – there were one or two brand names I’d never heard of, like Copicell, Daxian and Shouyue.
However, there were no unusually specc’d shanzhai products, of which Western readers are inordinately fond.
As IDC senior market analyst Dickie Chang told me, skyrocketing local rents are also focusing the minds of traders.
“Dealers need to pay more to cover rental costs, so they will need to think carefully about the products
they want to sell,” he argued.
It seems that the era of the weird and wonderful shanzhai handset, at least in Hong Kong, is well and truly over.
OpenStack: the open source cloud project taking Asia by storm
Posted: November 7, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: china, cloud computing, cloudscaling, hong kong, iaas, NASA, open source, openstack, OpenStack Summit, paas, rackspace, the register Leave a comment
Can you guess which city has more OpenStack contributors in it than any other on the planet? Well, it’s Beijing.
That may come as something of a surprise given the heritage of the open source cloud computing project – NASA and US hosting/cloud giant Rackspace.
However, it’s certainly not a one-off, with several other cities in the PRC also boasting significant numbers of acolytes, including Shanghai which also ranks in the global top ten.
I learnt this and rather a lot more about the project at the OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong this week. It was a conference heavy in symbolism for the OpenStack Foundation – its first ever outside the US and the first since the release of Havana – its eighth major release for building public, private and hybrid clouds.
Having slogged my way around IT conferences for more years than is healthy for a person of my age, the summit was a first for me in many ways.
First up the new announcements from vendors were kept very much in the background – barely mentioned at all in the keynotes and not publicised heavily elsewhere at the event.
Now that could be the fault of the event PR team but I’d like to think it’s because the Foundation are trying to send a message of inclusivity to the community – that no one vendor should be allowed to use the platform to market its wares so blatantly to a captive audience of over 3,000 enthusiasts.
That’s not to say there was no news, of course, or that the major vendors weren’t using the show to meet customers, get their message out, etc, but it was certainly toned down from the all-guns-blazing razzmatazz of some industry events I’ve been to.
Part of that no doubt lies in the fact OpenStack Summit is really about bringing the community together to share ideas and best practices on implementations and, quite literally, to sit down and draw up a roadmap for where it is headed next.
It is still very early days for OpenStack versus, say, Amazon Web Services, and there is a certain amount of tension still in the community about whether it should be seeking to emulate the cloud leader or take a separate path of innovation – “letting a thousand flowers bloom”, according to Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth.
The Rackspace private cloud VP Jim Curry and CTO John Engates I chatted to admitted feature parity isn’t at the same level as AWS yet, but also claimed that itself is a bit of a red herring as few people use all the features in Amazon anyway.
In the end one of the more eloquent and passionate speeches on the open source project came from Red Hat consulting engineer Mark McLoughlin – one of the top OpenStack contributors in the world if rumours are to be believed
“Does anyone think we’re just going to add a handful of new projects in 2014 and then stop? I really don’t think that’s realistic,” he said. “I think it’s going to continue to expand and become a broad umbrella of projects. We need to embrace the collaboration that’s happening under this OpenStack umbrella.”
Google: ‘Start-ups can save the world’
Posted: November 4, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: china, chinese university of hong kong, cloud computing, CUHK, entrepreneur, eric schmidt, google, hong kong, innovation, SAR, software, start up, tech startup 1 Comment
“Entrepreneurship is the solution to all the world’s problems,” according to Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, who was in Hong Kong today to launch a new program to foster greater start-up talent within the Chinese SAR.
Schmidt’s visit was something of an anti-climax in the end. Media were not invited to ask any questions and what we finally got from the Google man after a half hour delay was less than insightful.
He trotted out the usual argument that more innovation and technical invention will likely gravitate to this part of the world because there is a “numerical advantage” in terms of graduates with degrees in STEM subjects.
Several times he also repeated the notion that “the native underlying Chinese culture is entrepreneurial”.
“We all know this, it’s been true for 1000 years. It’s a great asset of Chinese history,” he said.
The inference here is that the region and its people should be more inclined than most to producing innovative technology start-ups.
However, we heard very little about why that’s simply not happened thus far, in Hong Kong at least, although Schmidt did acknowledge that there wasn’t enough of a VC industry here and that, although entrepreneurial, the locals are also culturally afraid of being “different”.
Google’s announcement today – a program of mentorship and incubation with the Chinese University of Hong Kong – is surely yet another indication that the SAR government has singularly failed to foster the kind of innovation that can start local and grow internationally.
It’s a view I’ve heard time and again – even from successful international technology companies who came to Hong Kong with an impression of a hi-tech city and found instead something much less mature to work with.
The conversations at most local tech conferences I’ve been to are still at a “what is the cloud?” stage. It’s difficult to believe sometimes.
When asked whether Google was thinking of founding a formal incubator project even Schmidt had to admit: “You don’t have a big enough software industry. Your lack of software … will hurt you in terms of your global ambitions.”
The one year project announced today is unlikely to change that much.
We don’t know exactly how much access to Silicon Valley “mentors” and help with start-up costs local entrepreneurs will get as part of the initiative, but at first glance it seems like a pretty good way for Google to cream off some of the best of that limited Hong Kong talent.
Rackspace goes East with first Asian public cloud launch
Posted: October 22, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: ajit melarkode, apac, BPO, cloud computing, hong kong, hybrid cloud, iaas, open source, openstack, private cloud, public cloud, rackspace hosting Leave a comment
OpenStack cloud vendor and Amazon–agitator Rackspace Hosting is launching its first public cloud offering for Asia in Hong Kong today, so I caught up with APAC MD Ajit Melarkode to talk all things Hong Kong, cloud and Rackspace.
I covered the news over at The Reg. Given that not many businesses rely solely on the public cloud, the announcement can be seen more in context of Rackspace’s Hybrid Cloud offering – which allows users to mix and match between public and private cloud and dedicated server hosting.
As such, I’m sure IT managers in the region will be keen to have another option for their cloudy needs.
They should also be assured that Rackspace is certainly investing significantly in the region, and Hong Kong, Melarkode told me. “We’ve sent a lot of Rackers out to set up here,” he said. “We’re not treating it as a satellite office – Hong Kong has really come into its own this year.”
Testament to this is Melarkode himself, who has experience of running operations on the ground in the region, and the fact that the firm is setting up dedicated finance, HR and marketing departments, as well as hiring a regional CTO, lead engineers, SMB and enterprise support staff, and ensuring that there is a good spread of local language speakers.
So who is Rackspace hoping to target with its new offering? Well, according to Melarkode, the growth of the Hong Kong office and APAC hub can be seen in parallel with the expansion of Rackspace customers into Asia: “as our customers expand we expand with them – we’re driven in a major part by client requirements”.
Another market he mentioned was that of the smaller innovative local companies in industries like retail and technology which are unencumbered by legacy infrastructure and are “leapfrogging onto new technologies like mobile and cloud”.
Melarkode was unsurprisingly quick to leap to the defence of Asian firms, which are often branded as copy cats and accused of lacking the ability to truly innovate.
He argued that creating services on top of “building blocks” already developed in the West does not necessarily amount to copying – and pointed out that firms from the region are contributing code to OpenStack, which he claimed is certainly not the behaviour of a technology laggard.
The region in general, while perhaps slightly behind the West, is certainly catching up in terms of the maturity of its IT services industry.
“I’ve seen how the region has developed right from the time Indian outsourcing started blooming in 1993, to the more hardware and infrastructure focus in China and the BPO success taking hold in the Philippines,” he explained.
“What I see is lagging behind here but the pace is still fantastic. Look at how it’s catching up. Lots of clients used cloud just for back-up and storage but now they’re starting to use it for app testing and development. The catch-up rate is astonishing.”
Rackspace will certainly need that maturity to expand beyond the handful of early movers in APAC if it’s to recoup some of its growing investment here.
Things are moving pretty fast, though, with the firm doubling headcount and its datacentre space in Hong Kong to meet expected demand and with plans to do so again in the coming year, Melarkode said.
Decrypt Weibo: new tool promises a censorship-free Sina Weibo
Posted: October 3, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: censorship, china, communist party, decrypt weibo, freeweibo, great firewall, greatfire.org, online freedom, sina weibo, the register, weibo Leave a comment
GreatFire.org, a not-for-profit calling for an end to China’s repressive censorship regime, has launched another tool designed to bring transparency to the Chinternet and no doubt some consternation in Beijing.
I covered the Decrypt Weibo announcement over at The Register. It pretty much does what it says on the tin, allowing users who see a post on Sina Weibo that has been blocked by the censors, to retrieve that message.
The founders of GreatFire have been mapping the censored Chinese internet for over two years now and last year launched FreeWeibo, a tool which allows users to conduct uncensored searches of Sina Weibo – by far China’s biggest weibo platform.
However their work so far seems to have flown under the radar, which probably comes down simply to user numbers.
“We’ve been operating FreeWeibo.com now for almost a year and they have not done anything to try to block that service,” co-founder Charlie Smith told me. “It may be that we are just a small blip on their radar. But we think that we are making things difficult for them and we are going to continue to makes things difficult.”
The big worry for internet freedom advocates is that China’s latest attempts to suppress online free speech have edged the closest yet to an Orwellian “thought police” model.
In attaching severe jail terms to any popular online message subsequently deemed to be a harmful “rumour”, the government will slowly and insidiously create a nation where all but the bravest are afraid to say anything mildly controversial online, for fear of reprisals.
That’s the worry anyway, as GreatFire alludes to in its post explaining the launch of Decrypt Weibo, although it’s good to hear that Smith and his team are undimmed in their fight.
“Sina’s likely reaction to our new service will be to inform the authorities about our presence … and put the matter in the hands of the police. The police won’t find us and won’t be able to shut us down which means that they would have to shut down the entire Sina Weibo service to stop us doing what we are doing. This would lead to a massive public outcry,” he said.
“Of course, we hope that they just decide to end online censorship voluntarily.”
In the end, the only way this could happen is if the Communist Party realised that its demand for indigenous innovation-based economic growth (rather than one reliant on copying and stealing IP) is doomed if it continues to suppress debate online and place such a heavy burden on web companies for self-policing their platforms.
Unfortunately I don’t think this will happen anytime soon, so in the meantime let’s hope Decrypt Weibo finds its way into the hands of as many Chinese netizens that need it as possible.
China ready to lift the Great Firewall. Maybe. In part of Shanghai
Posted: September 24, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: censorship, china, facebook, great firewall, hong kong, li keqiang, shanghai, shanghai free trade zone, twitter Leave a comment
Reports emerged from China today that at first sight seem almost unbelievable: the Communist Party about to lift the Great Firewall and unblock access to Facebook, Twitter and a host of other banned sites.
Then the small print. If the anonymous government sources are speaking the truth, it will be only be relevant to Shanghai Free Trade Zone, a 28 sq km pilot project designed to encourage greater foreign investment in China and open its economy up to the international markets.
“In order to welcome foreign companies to invest and to let foreigners live and work happily in the free-trade zone, we must think about how we can make them feel like at home,” one government source told the South China Morning Post.
“If they can’t get onto Facebook or read The New York Times, they may naturally wonder how special the free-trade zone is compared with the rest of China.”
Now while that seems fair enough, the Communist Party isn’t known for its love of unfettered access to the internet – after all the free flow of information online is precisely the sort of thing which it knows will lead to its demise.
So what’s this all about? Well, a few things sprung to mind:
- China is in the middle of one of the worst crack downs on online freedom anyone can remember, so don’t expect this localised liberalisation to spread anywhere else in the Middle Kingdom. The party is very much still for the suppression of any discussion it deems “harmful”.
- Even if the Great Firewall is lifted in the Shanghai zone, doing so from a technical standpoint will take time, according to Forrester analyst Bryan Wang.
“The network within the free trade zone will exist something like an intranet, which is connected to the international backbone without going through the Great Wall firewall,” he told me. “Current infrastructure will not be enough to support the future development. China Telecom or Unicom will need to lay out new fibre in the free trade zone.”
- The Party giveth and it taketh away. Nothing is confirmed yet, and until state-run media reprint the story, we can probably take it as just a rumour, possibly one designed to increase international publicity for the zone, which is a pet project of new premier Li Keqiang.
The whole free trade zone itself is only a pilot, so we can expect Beijing to bring the Great Firewall crashing back down on the region if its censorship-free internet policy backfires.
On a side note, how will Hong Kong react to the free trade zone?
If the Shanghai pilot is successful, more of them could spring up across China, effectively stealing its thunder as the only truly outward facing, economically liberalised, online censorship-free region in the Middle Kingdom.
Although a free and unfettered internet may soon no longer be a differentiator for Honkers, however, it’s likely that its superior IP protection regime, rule of law and business friendly visa system will still tip the balance in its favour for most MNCs.
Microsoft’s Windows Phone challenge: selling Nokia-less Lumias in India
Posted: September 19, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: brand Trust report, branding, china, IDC, india, lumia, lumia 520, microsoft, nokia, smartphones, windows phone, windows phone 8 Leave a comment
A couple of weeks ago I wrote how Asia would be the key to Microsoft’s success with its soon to be acquired handset business and Windows Phone. Well, new IDC stats out this week confirmed the importance to Redmond of one of Asia’s biggest markets, India, but also that it may struggle without the Nokia brand.
India is now rated by many analysts as the fastest growing smartphone market in the world.
The numbers speak for themselves. The largest democracy on the planet has a population of over 1.3 billion but smartphone penetration of only around 10 per cent – in this it’s some way even behind China and has huge growth potential.
The question is who’s going to capitalise? Well, at the moment it’s the same old story of cheap, local Android handset providers. In India Karbonn and Micromax are two of the most prominent.
Windows Phone was a surprise second place in Q2, however, with a market share of 5.3 per cent, according to IDC. Granted, this is way behind Android’s 90+ per cent, but still above iOS and BlackBerry and remember that percentages translate into 500,000+ units.
The key to success going forward, however, will be how it handles the Lumia, according to IDC analyst Kiranjeet Kaur.
She told me that although Nokia sells the Lumia 520, 620, 625, 720, 820, 920 and 925 in India it has been the 520’s low price point of around Rs 10,000 (£100) which has made it popular.
Microsoft can’t rely on the Lumia range to continue attracting buyers in the future though, because the all important Nokia brand will soon be removed.
“People buy the Lumia because they’ve had an association with Nokia for many years and see it as a good brand,” she said. “But if the [acquisition] deal goes through in the next few months I’m not sure how quickly Microsoft can do the rebranding.”
Time will tell whether this makes a big difference. It has to be said that Nokia was far from coasting in India. Despite winning the country’s Brand Trust Report for the third year in a row in February, it has been mired by tax problems and slowing sales.
Still, India remains Nokia’s second largest market after China, according to IDC, so the next 12 months will be a key test of whether Microsoft can continue the momentum and take on the likes of HTC and Samsung in the mid-range as well as stealing a bit of share from domestic players at the lower end.
It will be an uphill task.
No news is bad news for Apple in China
Posted: September 11, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: apple, china, china mobile, cupertino, forrester, huawei, iphone 5C, iphone 5S, iphone launch, lenovo, meizu, smartphone, xiaomi Leave a comment
So there it is. Apple’s much publicised Beijing iPhone launch event ended. With no news.
It appears that the fruit-themed company, while claiming that China will be its biggest market soon, does not believe it’s THAT important. At least yet. All the poor hacks were offered was a video of last night’s US launch. Ouch.
More importantly for Cupertino, the prices it has stuck on its new 5C and 5S devices will mean only the most hardy fanboys and girls will want to buy them. The iPhone 5C is definitely not budget, so it will fail to appeal to the mass low-end market currently consuming smartphones in China and India like there’s no tomorrow.
A 5C will retail for between 4,488 and 5,288 yuan ($733-864, £466-549). Compare this with the price for the high-end 5S in the US ($649-849) and you can see why some commentators reckon it will fail in the PRC.
It’s certainly not enough to beat Xiaomi’s impressively spec’d Mi-3 at 1,999 yuan ($326).
Forrester analyst Bryan Wang told me that it needs to come down to 2,999-3,499 yuan in order to “eat up the market share” of the likes of Huawei, Lenovo and Meizu, but that at present prices, the local Android players will be “really relieved”.
However, Apple is likely to have left itself some breathing room. It’s plan? Test the market out with these inflated prices and then “lower the price after a couple of months”.
Apple’s other hope of gaining much needed market share in China come from a possible tie up with the world’s largest operator, China Mobile, which has over 700 million subscribers.
No announcement was made at the Beijing press “conference” today but Wang believes it will come, when the carrier has a 4G network to announce. The reason? The 5C and 5S both support TD-LTE, a standard China Mobile helped to build.
APAC the key to Micr-okia success
Posted: September 6, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: apac, asha, brands, china, huawei, IDC, india, lumia, M&A, micromax, microsoft, nokia, smartphone, zte 1 Comment
It was Microsoft and Nokia’s big week this week and I’m sure the two will be hoping to hog the headlines going forward as much as they did over the past seven days. Now some might have unkindly described the alliance as “the sounds of two garbage trucks colliding”, but I’ve been getting the low down on why the deal should matter to APAC, or more realistically, why APAC should matter to Microsoft.
Let’s get one thing straight, APAC is essential to Microsoft’s future success in the smartphone space, not just because it has the world’s largest and fastest growing market – China and India respectively – but because Nokia has a really good legacy footprint there thanks to its feature phone biz.
The problem for Redmond, however, is that we’re not talking about feature phones any more, but smartphones. These markets are increasingly demanding smartphones, albeit low-end handsets, not feature phones. It’s why local players like Huawei, ZTE, Micromax and others are growing at such speed.
Nokia’s stock is greatest in India, where it has been voted most trusted brand for two years in a row, despite on-going tax problems with the authorities. Yet according to IDC’s Melissa Chau its relationship with operators isn’t particularly great anymore, so to large extent Microsoft is going to have to start from scratch here.
Building a budget Lumia will be vital and Chau told me Microsoft could do two things to help achieve this:
- Remove licensing charges – at the moment it’s built into the cost of the phone – which would wipe about $10 off per handset
- Use its combined internal expertise now with software and hardware to tweak Windows Phone so that it can run on hardware specs more suited to a lower price point.
It also needs to sort out Asha, she told me, starting with making the handset more attractive by sticking some Microsoft apps on it, and then hopefully in time transitioning those customers to a low cost Lumia.
This ain’t gonna be easy. The competition is fierce out there and with Nokia’s star waning and a severe lack of apps in the ecosystem the best Redmond can probably hope for is cementing it in third place behind the deadly duo of iOS and Android. With four of the Lumia’s top selling markets in APAC (including no. 1 and 2) however, it must make the region a priority.
Time will tell how successful it is, of course, but time, as we all know, is probably something Micr-okia doesn’t have.
phil muncaster 