An interesting discussion has taken place between a friend who lived big part of his life inside mobile operators in the region, he has a real extensive experience in mobile startups and good vision of the future of the mobile telecommunications, I usually have heated discussion with him regarding the future of the communication since I have a vision that data will be the leading bearer for the future and voice will be carried just like any other service over data (with a higher priority and QoS control..etc.) , while he believes that voice will always be the ”king” while data and broadband connections will be no more than internet browsing and downloading of files.
While I normally don’t agree with him, we tirelessly spend hours and hours discussing these subjects; however a latest discussion has really surprised me when he extended his conclusions to justify the current situation in Jordan with regards to the 3G licenses.
To those who doesn’t know Jordan is a very limited country in terms of natural resources, no oil or gas, a small agricultural country with very limited water sources, however the Jordanian market was considered one of the most competitive markets in terms of the telecommunications industry, the country of the 6m populations has currently 4 mobile operators, Zain (formerly Fastlink) the first operator in the region that launched its services back in 1994 being one of the leading mobile operators in the region, which was initially considered as a test bed for the giant Motorola so basically back in 1994 when no other neighboring country has launched the GSM services Fastlink was enjoying the latest technologies and services as those offered in Europe, later on Fastlink was acquired by the Kuwaiti MTC and got rebranded under the one-brand (and one-network) Zain
On 2000 MobileCom has launched its services with France Telecom as a controlling shareholder, then followed by Xpress which the first commercial iDEN operator in Arab World the and lately Umniah which was acquired by Batelco.
Unlike most neighboring countries the operators that launched mainly depended on the Jordanian staff starting from the executive level across all the major functions inside the operator, which made Jordanian staff very well sought for from the other operators as they proved their capabilities of launching Greenfield operators and turning them into success stories.
But it seems something wrong happened with the regulatory body there, after they have issued the license for the 4th mobile operator they changed the licensing scheme and hold issuing the 3G license, until lately when they issued a public consultation for issuing the 3G license where everyone told them that the bidding is not the best way to offer the license, however seeking for some 25millions JDs for the license they did issue the bid and “not surprisingly” only one operator applied for the license (Orange) which even didn’t comply with the requirements which it forced the TRC to withdraw the bidding and not issuing the license. On the other hand the TRA has issued many WiMAX licenses and in Jordan you can find 4 or 5 WiMAX operators competing side by side with the 5 or 6 ADSL service providers, claiming that they are offering the 4G services! Although WiMAX is actually classified as 3G service which is nowhere close to the 4G rates (360/80 Mbps Uplink/Downlink)
Back to the discussion with my friend, he is saying that since WiMAX is being offered as the wireless broadband service then why to go with 3G!!! especially when Zain can provide you with the e-Go which is a WiMAX USB dongle that can be used for those looking for mobile broadband, and he is saying that the 3G will go nowhere other than a pure broadband access which is already given by the WiMAX!.
Here I have to stop and respond to him in 3 directions; the first one is from a pure analysis and market comparison perspective, the second response will be from a pure technical perspective, and I will keep the third one dedicated for ourselves as employees in this industry.
While the first 3GPP WCDMA was launched back in 2002 until now there are more than 300+ active WCDMA networks in the world, the number of the WCDMA subscribers is more than 200 million, when the new Greenfield 3 3G operator launched its services in UK (which has the highest non-voice ARPU the world) it increased the 3G penetration to 8% in almost no time. In Japan the 3G penetration is more than 25% after Docomo’s launch; and everyone knows that Docomo was the first operator to support the 3G and pushed the technology further actually I actually need to dedicate a post for the Japanese market especially with Docomo’s i-mode and the way of supporting the 3G in addition to the soon to launch Nokia MVNO there.
Another important point that has to be kept in mind that the mobile business market is driven by the availability of attractive CPEs, so to be able to reach a major market share, handsets offering for all market segments is really key, currently there are more than 300 different WCDMA terminal models from more than 30 suppliers. Look at the Nokia terminals when they launched the first 3G handset in 2003 currently it is hard to find a new Nokia handset that doesn’t support 3G!
Now let me put the technical hat on and start talking about how the 3G was meant to enhance and provide a better user experience than the normal 2G+ currently being offered in Jordan; once launched the WCDMA subscribers should be increasing and it should allow the 3G network to carry bigger share of voice and data traffic, and since the WCDMA technology provides many advantages over the existing 2G network it should enhance the end user experience because it will not only enables high speed data but also improves basic voice services, the offered voice capacity in 3G is very high because of interference control mechanisms including the frequency reuse of fast power control and soft handover, so WCDMA offers considerable more voice minutes to customers and at the same time it can also enhance the voice service with wideband AMR codec, which provides clearly better voice quality than the 2G and even better than fixed network. So the bottom line is 3G offer more voice minutes with better quality.
In addition to the better spectral efficiency, 3G provides even more dramatic evolution in terms of base station capacity and hardware efficiency, thanks to the wideband carrier which allows a large number of users to be supported per carrier and were radio frequency carriers are required to provide the same capacity, so with the fewer RF parts and more digital baseband, 3G can benefit from the fast improvements in the DSP technologies.
Last but not least 3G operators are able to provide new and interesting data services including browsing, peer to peer video calls, video IVR, video mail, sports and news video clips and mobile TV, 3G enables simultaneous voice and data which allows for instance browsing or emailing during voice conferencing, or real time video monitoring using the 3G cameras. Which I agree that they sounds interesting but despite the numbers and the MOUs are considerably low in the countries that launched them it doesn’t mean that not offering any of these services is a wise decision especially when everyone has a 3G handset and never used any of the 3G services!
Since my friend and me are working in this industry we got the experience from the used to be biggest telecom school in the Arab world (Jordan) we then travelled around the region and participated in launching new operators, I personally left Jordan in 2005 when no 3G was around in the region and witnessed the first 3G launch in Saudi Arabia, I also worked on launching a 3G network in Palestine and currently working closely to a 3G operator in Oman, so basically I learnt the 3G concepts, skills and techniques of the 3G outside of Jordan, but for those who haven’t left Jordan yet, I am not sure if terms like HSDPA, HSUPA, IMS, Node B or RNC would ring a bell for them or they are still working in the GPRS and EDGE worlds.
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