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Tuesday, 4 June 2013

The LTE Game Changer: How LTE affects Malaysia's Mobile Content Business

In December 2012, MCMC (Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission) has announced that eight companies were allowed to access the country's 2600MHz spectrum band for LTE services.

The eight companies were Celcom, DiGi Telecommunications, Maxis Broadband, Packet One Networks, Puncak Semangat, REDtone, U Mobile, and YTL Communications.

Earlier in 2013, we have slowly seen local Telcos rolling out their LTE services with a lot attractive data plan bundled together.

Maxis has launched their high-speed 4G LTE network on 1 January 2013, and (according to Maxis) they are also the first Telco in Malaysia to activate 4G LTE for Apple devices such as iPhone 5, iPad mini and iPad 4, as well as you can see the same thing with other local Telcos like Celcom and DiGi.

Of course, penetration of LTE service has to work closely with phone maker, and this investment can't be a successful if none of their subscribers is upgrading to LTE phone. Hence, you can see how desperately Maxis is pushing their iPhone5 and Samsung 4S package with so much attractive data plan. In fact, I have signed up too with Maxis for their iPhone5 package.


How LTE affect to Malaysia's mobile content business? 
We see this as an advantage to our industry in term of the delivery of mobile content. A solid connectivity between mobile phone and content provider is extremely important once a mobile user has subscribed to their service via SMS short code

Today, many Mobile Content Providers (CP) has started shifting their content delivering method from SMS to internet channel (included GPRS, EDGE, 3G, LTE). In early years, when you purchase a mobile content via short code, you will usually receive the purchased content in SMS format, and now (as most of the mobile users have already signed up internet data plan with their operator) you will most likely receive a WAP SMS with a embedded URL. 

With high penetration of mobile internet, Content Provider (CP) has started to change their business model by offering even more bigger size content (such as mobile apps and games). Content providers have already 'think out of the box' with all these available mobile connectivity, and SMS has just act as their micro payment tool in collecting payment from their mobile users. 

Just to share a business case study from EVERWORKS.com, my client was thinking to offer some pre-launch test play for their latest online game and to allow their client to purchase the test play credit online using credit card. The price for each credit is RM5. 

Initially, my client has planned to use credit card payment to sell this credit online.

But to setting up the online payment gateway maybe too time consuming for this short term service, and most of clients may not have credit card yet at their age (age between 16 to 20). So how do EVERWORKS solved for this client?

We at EVERWORKS.com has suggested to use our premium SMS short code (such as 32886, 33886, or 36886 in Malaysia) to sell the game credit. 

But how to incorporate with their online business? In our proposal, we will integrate our SMS gateway with my client's existing servers (server that manage and generate activation code), and pass the activation code to our SMS servers.

So, if anyone request the test play credit in their website, the website will instruct the users to purchase it by sending in a SMS command such as GAME 1 to 32886. Our gateway will then reply the mobile user the activation code via SMS, and charge the RM5. User can key in the activation code on the web page to continue their game. 

4G LTE is growing very fast ......  From the recent report by research firm, Wireless Intelligence has revealed that there are now 100 million 4G LTE connections across the globe. According to the research specialist, there are now 163 LTE networks operating in 70 countries.

Furthermore, these figures are expected to increase to more than 400 networks in 120 countries by the end of 2017. Operators in countries such as Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea and the US have so far been principle drivers of this industry growth, with 90% of the international LTE connections market.

“Around 100 LTE networks have launched last year globally and as many are expected to launch this year,” said Joss Gillet, senior analyst at Wireless Intelligence.

Gillet also predicts that there will be in excess of 900 million LTE connections globally by December 2017, reaching one billion in the first half of 2018.

Monday, 3 June 2013

Report: 826,000 people had their mobile stolen last year.

Recently, there is an interesting report conducted by CSEW (Crime Survey for England and Wales) - there is total of 826,000 people had their mobile stolen last year, with the number of mobile robbery victims up from 759,000 in 2009/2010 to 826,000 in 2011/2012
Teens aged between 14-17 and adults aged 18-24 were found to be most at risk from mobile phone thieves, as the survey found that those within these age ranges were twice as likely to have their mobile stolen than others. Women in the 18-24 age grouping were revealed to be the most likely to be targeted, with one in 20 reporting a stolen phone.
However, the crime survey also showed a drop in mobile phone theft from those aged 10-13, which was down from 2.6 per cent in 2009/2010 to 1.7 per cent in 2011/2012.

There was also a year-on-year dip in the number of mobile phone thefts against 14-17 year-olds, which fell from 5.2 per cent to 4.0 per cent, although the rate of thefts against those aged 75 and over were up from 0.2 per cent to 0.7 per cent. Overall, the percentage of thefts and robberies involving a mobile phone jumped to 46 per cent in 2011/2012 from 31 per cent in 2010/2011.

Monday, 13 May 2013

Is SMS Marketing still important for 13th Malaysian General Election?

Some people said, one of the biggest successful marketing channel that engaged by Opposition Party in the 12th General Election is 'SMS marketing'. Do you agree with this? I think many people will say YES if still remember on what happened in 5 years back. But what about 5 years later in this 13th General Election? Will SMS marketing still popular in this 13th General Election? 

So, let's us review this issue together and to see on what happened in SMS industry for the past 20 days before our 13th General Election or Pilihan Raya Umum ke-13 (PRU 13) on 5th of May 2013. During this pre-election period, we still see the 3 standard types of SMS channel that being used in 2008, and still being used this time to promote their election campaign. What are the 3 standard SMS channel? 

1 : Bulk SMS via short code 
Sample SMS for Bulk SMS
This is the regulated method by local Telcos in Malaysia. That mean each of these SMS are sent directly via local Telcos by licensed company such as EVERWORKS.com. As we know, this method is usually the most expensive method in market. The price is about RM0.09 to RM0.06 (depending on their volume). 

From the sample here, you may notice this SMS is sent from '63001', where this is a registered short code that by belong to a licensed SMS company. Of course, this SMS company must have agreement with all local Telcos, such as Maxis, Celcom, and DiGi in order to provide such SMS services to their client. 

From our survey in this 13th election, we believe this is the most popular method for our Malaysia politicians to delivery their message to their targeted audience.

2 : International Bulk SMS
This method will be much cheaper than the method#1 as all these SMS will sending into Malaysia Telcos via international providers. The market price for this channel is about RM0.05 to RM0.04 per SMS. But this method has been banned by all Telcos, and even MCMC (Malaysian Communications And Multimedia Commission) has banned this method due to some security reasons. Many Telcos in Malaysia has already implemented some filtration tool to prevent such SMSs to reach their mobile users. 

How to differential whether this SMS is from International bulk SMS? The most simple way to identify international bulk SMS is from the SMS's Sender ID. It's sender ID is usually come with some international number such as +143839301113. From our survey, we found out some politicians are still using this method in sending their political message to the mobile users. But all their SMS content did not carried or mentioned any of name or party. They are merely to carry out some general message that related to everyone in Malaysia. In summary, this method is cheaper than local bulk SMS, but giving the same delivery speed like local bulk SMS. The main disadvantage is Low Delivery Rate, as many of our local Telcos already started to block international SMS. 

3 : P2P SMS via GSM modem
Sample of Enterprise GSM Modems (Side View)
What is P2P SMS? P2P mean Person-to-Person messaging method that initial by normal Telcos SIM card, and this method is just like how we send a SMS to person via our mobile phone. This method is always the most direct, and most high delivery rate (I would say 100% delivery). P2P SMS is among the cheapest method in the market, selling price about RM0.05 to RM0.03 per SMS (depending on volume). But the main problem is the Delivery Speed. From testing, the speed of sending one SMS will take about 5-6 second from one modem (that's why P2P provider will have purchase a lot of modem in order to increase their sending speed). 


Sample of Enterprise GSM Modems (Top View)
From our survey, many politicians are engaged to this method to delivery their SMS, which I believe they are engaged to a 3rd party to delivery their SMS. How it work? Basically, the SMS Provider will purchase some SMS modem and local prepaid SIM cards from each local Telcos, then they will configure these modems to work with a SMS broadcasting software such as SMS Caster that installed on a server or even personal computer. 

Sample of P2P SMS

In P2P industry, SMS Caster is among the most popular SMS broadcasting software for GSM modem. User can easily upload all their contact (from local excel file) into the local server or personal computer, and you can even schedule your broadcasting campaign easily from this software. 





In summary, SMS marketing for election is always a big challenge for the government in making sure no one is abusing the telecommunication channel to broadcast some misleading or fake information to the mobile users in this election, as this may affect to the stability of our country. Below is the news that I copied from TheEdge and it did mentioned on the regulation if anyone has abused the used of SMS for their election purpose.