Re-posting online report issued from source Comm's Day.
"Vodafone Australia is committing major resources to evaluating a potential fixed-line play over NBN, according to CEO Inaki Berroeta. And the firm is also targeting leadership in the next generation of mobile, announcing that it will start running 5G lab trials and demonstration in just a few weeks’ time.
At a media briefing in Sydney, an ebullient Berroeta declared that July had been the carrier’s “best commercial month ever,” following a solid set of FY16 results that saw it increase customer numbers and reduce its net loss position.
He also rattled through a slew of positive indicators for Vodafone’s mobile network, from four consecutive quarters with the lowest complaints ratio amongst Australia mobile operators to soaring average monthly data usage (3.2Gb in June 2016, up from 400MB in January 2013) and the rapid expansion of voice over LTE, with over 800,000 customers currently provisioned. Amidst Vodafone’s mobile resurgence, however, many observers have been asking when and how the firm might expand into fixed-line in Australia – especially given that it runs both fixed and mobile businesses in most other countries where it operates. Global CEO Vittorio Colao told CommsDay earlier this year that the NBN would be an “important enabler;” Berroeta picked up on this theme.
“Since Vittorio said that, we have been working a lot on this... now we’ve seen the NBN reaching a number of households, [around] one million premises, and they have announced close to five million by the end of next year. This is also an area that we are looking at very closely,” he said. “We are investing a lot of time and effort in understanding whether this is something that we want to go into in the future, and how to do it in a way that we can provide some value to our customers.”
But with other fixed-line ISPs already jostling for a share of the expanding NBN market – which at a million households connected is already roughly 10% the size of its eventual target footprint – the obvious question is just how long Vodafone can afford to wait.
“10% of households is probably not yet the volume of premises that we think is viable – but definitely five million [would be]!” Berroeta told CommsDay. “But what we don’t want is to be just another one... it’s about how can we do something more for our customers. We have time... I think the way the model has been created in Australia, it
[wouldn’t be] a very difficult entrance.”
5G TRIALS: Vodafone will not, however, be resting on its laurels in the mobile space. Like its rivals, it is planning to be at the forefront of 5G development – even though the standard itself is not expected to be ratified until around 2020 – and to this end will be running lab trials and demos of some 5G technology, currently planned for
around mid-October. Vodafone sees 5G as a multifaceted standard that will need to cope with both massive connection density for the IoT, low latencies for sensitive use cases, and very high speed on conventional mobile broadband access. Head of wireless strategy Jeff Owen, though, told CommsDay that this year’s trials would focus primarily on the air interface, pushing “multi-gigabit” access speeds and low latencies, down around the one millisecond mark.
“I think it’ll be an era where the user requirements are going to be more diverse than in 2G, 3G or even 4G,” he said. “5G is going to change networks structurally, [but] those sort of phases come later on. So later this year we’ll focus on experimenting with the air interface.”
Access network delivery GM Kevin Millroy, who’ll be taking over from outgoing CTO Benoit Hanssen, was tight-lipped around which of Vodafone’s vendor partners – which include Huawei, Nokia and Ericsson – would be helping with the trial. “We’re working with a number of partners; there’s not going to be any announcement as to who we’re working with. But it will be our first opportunity to see and experience what a customer will get with a 5G offering, the first glimpse of it.” And while it’s keen to keep at the cutting edge of 5G, Vodafone won’t be doing any pre-standardisation deployment. “Our industry depends on standards and standardisation,” said Hanssen. “For us in Australia, I think we’ll be very early out with a standardised 5G offering – but it will be standardised.”
...and steps up IoT push as new research
shows Australian corporate interest Vodafone Australia also has its sights set on leadership in the growing Internet of
Things space, drawing on the expertise of the Vodafone Group globally, with the net-work team putting the foundations in place and exploring technology such as Narrowband-
IoT. The firm has just released new data indicating that more than three quarters of Australian companies believe the Internet of Things will be critical for the future success of organisations in their sector – and 51% are planning to launch new connected solutions in the next twelve months According to executive GM for enterprise Stuart Kelly, the Australian IoT market is expected to be worth over a billion dollars in revenue by 2021. “We’re at the early stages
of IoT, but the network team are laying the foundations for us to lead the market in this space; worldwide, Vodafone Group is the number one player when it comes to machine- to-machine and IoT, and we need to take that capability and bring it to the Australian market,” he said.
Vodafone has, for instance, been running a trial with South East Water in Victoria of IoT water metering, with the first phase about to conclude. A second phase – where Vodafone will roll out an extra twenty sites and 300 devices – will start shortly. CEO Inaki Berroeta said that the firm would also be looking at narrowband IoT technology to enhance its services in Australia. Certainly there could be plenty of room for telcos to add value in Australia’s burgeoning IoT market. Vodafone globally has just released its annual IoT barometer report, which polled almost 1,100 companies across more than a dozen countries and included Australia for the first time this year. While it found that 78% of Australian companies polled saw the IoT as critical for future success in their sector, and 51% were
planning to launch new connected solutions in the next twelve months, it also flagged some major issues.
“When we compare Australia to see how we compare globally and also to APAC, the findings actually aren’t great from an Australian standpoint. What we find is that Australia’s lagging behind APAC... one of the key reasons is [that] Australian businesses, in excess of 50% of them, believe from a process standpoint that we are not prepared to
manage the security requirements of IoT. So work has to be done in that space,” said Kelly. “When you compare that to APAC, when you look at Singapore or Hong Kong, 75% of customers in the survey stated they were absolutely ready today. So APAC is charging ahead, and we need to get up to the game from an Australian standpoint.”
“One of the other things we need to look at is expertise; when we looked at IoT within Australia, there’s definitely a shortage of expertise... that was a big feedback from the survey. Most customers believe there is expertise out there, but internally they don’t have the expertise to manage the requirements of IoT – and they’re looking for
organisations such as Vodafone to globally bring that together, and help them on that journey.
Petroc Wilton"
