Author: Malcolm Rogers

Based in Sydney, Australia, Malcolm Rogers is an Analyst with GlobalData. He is responsible for delivering research and consulting projects leveraging research and analysis from across the Global Data technology group. Malcolm offers impactful market data and insight to enterprise buyers, service providers and the vendor community across Asia-Pacific. Current areas of focus include telecommunications networks and services, mobile markets, and enterprise ICT services. He specializes in the analysis of the communications and technology markets across the countries in Asia-Pacific. Malcolm is also in charge of modeling and forecasting demand and service revenue for fixed, mobile and pay-TV services on a quarterly basis, and regularly publishes research and analysis on key country, regional and global trends on telecommunications networks and digital services. He also contributes to custom and consulting projects in Asia Pacific.

Vocus and FSG Have Opportunity to Expand in Critical Verticals with OneWeb Services

January 21, 2022 by Malcolm Rogers, posted in IT Leader, Network

Summary Bullets:

Vocus’ deal with OneWeb will greatly enhance its ability to provide connectivity services to the most remote sites using Vocus fiber as the backbone and OneWeb LEO as the last mile.
Partnership with OneWeb will enable FSG to accelerate its rural LTE/5G network rollout and increase its capabilities to offer private networks to the mineral and energy verticals.

OneWeb, a UK-based satellite connectivity company, recently announced two new partnerships with telecommunications providers in Australia. The deals will see Vocus and Field Solutions Group (FSG) resell OneWeb’s wholesale and retail low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite connectivity services to consumers, governments, and enterprise in Australia. Compared to traditional satellite connectivity, which is provided via geosynchronous orbit (GEO) satellites, LEO is much closer to the earth’s atmosphere and provides much higher-bandwidth, lower-latency broadband. For example, in March 2021, OneWeb demonstrated speeds of 500 Mbps and 32ms latency in tests with its fleet of satellites. By comparison, NBN’s GEO service, SkyMuster, has a maximum wholesale speed of 25 Mbps downlink and 5 Mbps uplink, with independent tests putting latency around 600ms. OneWeb’s capabilities will give Vocus and FSG opportunities to expand their business in the critical energy and mining sectors in regional and rural Australia. Continue reading “Vocus and FSG Have Opportunity to Expand in Critical Verticals with OneWeb Services “ →

Telstra Health’s Potential Could Bolster Telstra’s Edge Ambitions

December 8, 2021 by Malcolm Rogers, posted in Communicate

Summary Bullets:

• Telstra Health has set ambitious revenue growth targets for FY2025, hoping to drive growth through developing new connected platforms cutting across the healthcare industry.

• There is opportunity for Telstra to work more closely with its healthcare subsidiary and leverage its edge, security and analytics capabilities to support Telstra Health’s goals and develop vertical solutions.

More than seven years ago Telstra invested in a new line of business as it looked to diversify revenues ahead of the launch of the NBN. This business, Telstra Health, has grown through the years to A$160 million in revenue for FY2021 ended June 30, 2021. This total does not include 2021 revenues from Telstra Health’s acquisition of medical practice management software provider Medical Director, nor its joint-venture (in which Telstra Health controls a majority stake) with medical budgeting and costing software provider Power Health. With recent acquisitions included, Telstra Health made A$250 million in FY2021. However, Telstra has even loftier goals for its health focused subsidiary; as announced at its Telstra Investor Day Part II, Telstra Health is targeting to double its revenue to FY2025, a goal of A$500 million.

Continue reading →

Telstra’s Edge Platform Is Set to Lead the Way in the Australian Edge Market, but May Have Company Soon

November 10, 2021November 10, 2021 by Malcolm Rogers, posted in IT Leader

Summary Bullets:

• Telstra is looking to build a commanding lead in the enterprise edge platform solutions marker in Australia, announcing the roadmap for its platform and early use cases.

• While Telstra’s offering is comprehensive and unique in the market, like cloud, edge will have room for all kinds of players and Telstra will see more competition as the market matures.

Telstra recently updated the market with its roadmap for its new “Telstra Edge Compute” platform that launched its first solution. Telstra Edge Compute is comprised of various existing Telstra products as well as new ones developed through partnerships made over the past several years. Essentially the company is stitching together the results of the last few years of product development (Telstra Adaptive Networks, Telstra Adaptive Cloud, and Telstra Adaptive Edge) and partnerships (Ericsson/Cradlepoint, Microsoft Azure, and AWS) to provide an all-in-one “edge” solution to the market. In this case, “all-in-one” includes network and connectivity (Telstra 5G, NBN, or third party), SD-WAN, security (next generation firewalls, secure cloud gateways, endpoint security, secure network architecture, and monitoring), storage and compute infrastructure from Telstra, AWS Outposts or Microsoft Azure Stack, and Telstra IoT capabilities wrapped in professional services and service management led by Telstra’s consulting arm Telstra Purple.

Telstra’s edge is an extension of existing customer cloud and data center environments. As such, the Telstra Purple professional services component will be key. Like the cloud migration journeys many enterprises have undergone over the past several years, Telstra envisions a similar edge migration journey. Customers will undergo application, infrastructure, and security architecture discovery with Telstra guiding customers towards a mix of on-premises, edge and cloud deployments, and connectivity types based on application performance requirements.

Continue reading “Telstra’s Edge Platform Is Set to Lead the Way in the Australian Edge Market, but May Have Company Soon” →

Field Solutions Group: The Rural Telco Tier 1s Should Keep an Eye On

November 10, 2021 by Malcolm Rogers, posted in Cloud Enable, Internet of Things, IT Leader, Mobilize, Network

Summary Bullets:

FSG, a telco focused only on regional and rural Australia, is set to become Australia’s fourth MNO in 2022 as it builds out a 200-plus tower network.
The company has valuable spectrum assets, a unique neutral host approach, and a focus on critical verticals to become a threat in the enterprise 5G market in rural areas.

A little-known, fledgling telecom company called Field Solutions Group (FSG) has quietly become Australia’s fourth mobile network operator. The company, which focuses specifically on providing FWA, NBN, and mobile services to regional and rural Australian businesses and government organizations, has an ambitious plan to build out more than 200 mobile towers in regional and rural Australia by 2023. Currently, the company only offers FWA on its ‘Regional Australia Network,’ but through government grants from the Mobile Blackspot Program, technology partnerships with Optus, and the recent acquisition of Tasmanet, the company hopes to be a disruptive fourth MNO option for regional and rural governments and businesses. While the company is small, earning AUD 18.8 million in FY 2021 (ended June 30, 2021), the company has a few things working in its favor that could enable it to become a real challenger to the largest telcos when competing for business and enterprise 5G revenues in rural and regional Australia over the coming years. Continue reading “Field Solutions Group: The Rural Telco Tier 1s Should Keep an Eye On” →

An Aussie Broadband Over the Wire Merger Makes Sense, and Could Make Trouble for the Australian Telco Market

October 28, 2021 by Malcolm Rogers, posted in Communicate

Summary Bullets:

• Aussie Broadband has made a proposal to acquire Over The Wire for A$344 million, which if it goes through would make the combined company a top-five telco in the country.

• On the enterprise side there are lots of synergies, particularly with Aussie Broadband’s Carbon platform lining up with Over the Wire’s managed services capabilities.

Rapidly growing telco Aussie Broadband, made headlines last week when it made a non-binding offer to acquire business focused telco and managed service provider Over The Wire (OTW). After the leak both companies made official announcements to the ASX that an offer had been made to the tune of A$5.75 per share (equivalent to A$344 million). While both companies have clearly stated this does not mean a deal is imminent, and the official due diligence period will not come to an end until November 30th, the move makes a lot of sense and could create a real national level competitor in the enterprise telecoms and ICT services market, from the two upstarts.

Continue reading →

Capgemini Looks to Opportunities in Australian Government and Industry with Empired Buy

July 30, 2021July 30, 2021 by Malcolm Rogers, posted in Big Data, IT Leader

Summary Bullets:

• Capgemini’s recent acquisition of Empired caps off a spending spree on Australian applications and data specialists that suggest a shift in focus to grow its business in Asia Pacific

• Capgemini’s broad capabilities paired with Empired, a Microsoft specialist strong in Western Australia with many clients in minerals, energy, and government, offers unique opportunities for growth in areas like industrial IoT

Capgemini Sets its Sights on Australia

French systems integrator, consultancy, and IT services provider Capgemini announced plans to purchase Empired, an Australian cloud and digital services provider based out of Perth. The acquisition brings over 1,000 professionals to Capgemini and augments the IT services provider’s footprint in Australia and New Zealand. The deal is expected to close at the end of 2021 for $233 million. Empired has offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane, and Adelaide within Australia. It also has significant operations in New Zealand and a sales office in the US.

Continue reading →

What Is Driving the Unique 5G Success in China and South Korea?

July 29, 2021July 29, 2021 by Malcolm Rogers, posted in Internet of Things, Network

Summary Bullets:

China and South Korea are leading the world in adoption for 5G services on the back of heavy CapEx investment to deliver rapid coverage and next-generation speeds early on from launch.
Adoption is also being driven by the development of value-added services and use cases for 5G technology in both consumer and enterprise segments.

China and South Korea: Leaders in 5G

5G is now here. Around the world, operators are in the midst of their network buildouts and device vendors are pushing 5G-capable handsets, tablets, and wearables to the market. However, two countries stand out in the speed at which consumers and enterprise have adopted 5G services. According to GlobalData’s mobile broadband forecasts, by the end of 2020, China and South Korea outpaced the world in 5G adoption with 26% and 24% 5G subscription penetration of the population, respectively, compared to the global penetration of 5% at the end of the same period (for more, please see: “Global Mobile Broadband Forecast,” June 25, 2021). This rapid adoption of 5G is beginning to help operators in these markets grow revenue from mobile services, with overall 2021 mobile service ARPU in China and South Korea expected to rise. Continue reading “What Is Driving the Unique 5G Success in China and South Korea?” →

Whatever Happened to AT&T’s AirGig?

June 21, 2021June 22, 2021 by Malcolm Rogers, posted in Network

Summary Bullets:

AT&T’s announcement of Project AirGig in 2016 was a compelling and novel way to think about providing high-speed broadband services.
Following a press conference and tease of a 2021 release in 2018, AT&T has gone silent on the project, prompting questions about its future.

Bygone BPL

During the mid-2000’s, broadband over power line (BPL) technology (using power lines to simultaneously transmit data signals) was an exciting topic in the telecommunications industry. The hope was the technology could deliver speeds equivalent or greater than ADSL and provide a cheap and effective means of connecting rural communities and improving broadband infrastructure in brownfield areas without the need to lay new fiber. The IEEE developed standards, and various governments, carriers, and even utilities launched trials and services. While the technology caught on for some utilities as a means to monitor the health of their own grids, most if not all commercial attempts to develop a consumer access product failed. Failures were blamed on a few factors, including radio interference easily impacting unshielded power lines, complications managing right-of-way access with utilities, and slower than predicted data rates. Today, BPL for consumer access is all but dead; however, at the end of 2016, AT&T announced a new project, ‘AirGig,’ with a lot of similarities. Continue reading “Whatever Happened to AT&T’s AirGig?” →

SingTel’s NCS Strategy Hits the Right Notes, but Might be Looking in the Wrong Places

May 31, 2021 by Malcolm Rogers, posted in Network

Summary Bullets:

• Singtel has announced a new strategy alongside its financial results, which includes a renewed focus on digital business and the expansion of its NCS unit internationally.

• While Singtel has identified the right trends to click into for NCS, the Australian and Chinese markets will be challenge and there could be other opportunities with its subsidiaries in ASEAN.

Singtel announced its financial results for the fiscal year 2021 ended March 31, 2021 on May 28, 2021. Singtel reported a difficult year across the group, in part due to the effects of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic as well as structural changes with the NBN in Australia and more generally across the telco sector. However the company did share some bright spots, for example the performance of its NCS business. Further, as part of the associated analyst and investor presentation Singtel presented a new strategy going forward with the hopes of capitalizing on key growth trends in digital and ICT markets in Asia-Pacific region. These include “B2B digital services growth,” “digital ASEAN opportunity,” and “rapid digitalisation fuelling infrastructure demand.

What’s the Plan?

Continue reading →

Rakuten Has Ambitious Plans to Become a Mobile Cloud Network Provider

May 28, 2021 by Malcolm Rogers, posted in Cloud Enable

Summary Bullets:

Rakuten Mobile is taking the cloud-native, open RAN-based mobile network it built in Japan and commercializing it as an open, end-to-end solution for other operators.
While Rakuten’s mobile network solution is competing with similar recently launched products from leading technology companies like Microsoft and VMware, they all might have trouble convincing their target operator customers.

Rakuten Mobile, Japan’s fourth mobile operator, made headlines in the mobile industry in 2020 for launching its 4G mobile services using a cloud-native, fully virtualized mobile network, one that works on the principles of open RAN. (Open RAN is a set of specifications for open and interoperable radio access networks allowing for disaggregation of portions of the radio access network, namely the radio unit [RU] as well as the distributed baseband and core baseband units, and for those subsections to be supplied by different vendors). However, the company has taken lessons learned from the buildout of its own 4G and 5G cloud-native network and is now trying to productize this into a solution called Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP). In addition to providing a solution for mobile operators, Rakuten is reportedly developing enterprise use cases for 5G edge computing for industry and IoT that can be also supported by the platform. Continue reading “Rakuten Has Ambitious Plans to Become a Mobile Cloud Network Provider” →