Telecom’s bold move towards ISP’s service!

On July 10, Ncell announced the pre-booking of “wirefreeplus” services , a similar to the wireless internet services which the ISP’s have been providing. Later after few days, Nepal Telecom also plans to initiate the same type of services by utilizing its Wi-Max services which have been the flop projects in Nepal. When such two telecom giants are introducing such scheme similar to ISP’s, we want to cover a little more about on this topic.

1. What do Ncell say about their service?

According to Ncell notice, they have bring this “wirefreeplus” service in-order to provide the reliable, affordable and fast internet connections. They elaborated that, Nepal’s faster and reliable need for internet have been hindered by wires and bad service. This directly reflect to the current services provided by the ISP’s. They will provide this service on volume based.

2. What do Nepal Telecom say about their service?

According to Nepal Telecom, they will soon initiated this service in-order to utilize their existing Wi-Max devices and equipment’s. However,according to NTC this services will combine their GSM with Wi-MAX. The maximum bandwidth for this will be 10Mbps.

Read Also: Where and why did NT Wi-Max have failed?

Nepal telecom states that, they cannot provide more speed because this can hamper their existing GSM mobile users. Also, the bandwidth utilization will be high too. This services will be available within the next year.

3. Can this Wi-Fi from telecom’s will fight against ISP’s?

According to latest MIS data (Baisakh 2077 BS) provided by NTA, there are 1,106,352 subscribers who have been registered for Internet Subscribers service which includes services like FTTH, ADSL, Wireless, Cable and many more. Out of this, only 44,453 are wireless and FTTH compromises 837,013 subscribers which is 83% of the total market share.

The last 5 year from 2015-2020 indicates that there is demand for high speed internet despite the charges/amount. The reliable and expandable features on the FTTH leads to rise in the choice. While choice for others services like ADSL, Cable and Wireless have been tremendously declined. The reason for this is they were limited in the speed, lacks proper maintenance from service provider and not technology friendly.

From above data, we can justify that there is hunger in data and is increasing. So one worries, the telecom’s could have is that. would they be able to fulfill the data craving of the users? Moreover, if they start to provide, they likely to face issues in their existing mobile data users.

However, we can’t neglect the portability that this Wi-Fi system brings. FTTH is faster and cheaper but due to its inconvenience for portability, people tend to adapt this service too. Also, the coverage for the mobile data is very high in high hills and mountains where ISP’s services lacks.

Pricing:

Besides, the cost of wirefreeplus is higher as released from Ncell. There are 3 packages gold, platinum and Diamond as below.

Price per GB for Diamond packages seems reasonable with almost Rs 11/GB. This whole packages are exclusive of all the taxation.

4. Why telecom’s are going on this service?

If we talk about Ncell, they have been adopting a quite different and trendy paths. They have been providing various enterprise services like Data center colocation, vehicle tracking services, Biz Connect, National Connect, Filed Force Automation and many more. Ncell is spreading a palm on different source of income.

While, NT is providing this service with the utilization of resources of Wi-Max. NT is also seeing a greater opportunity in wireless broadband services because of the wider availability of their network. They can easily leverage the market once they started by keeping the price reasonable.

Telecom’s will provide this wi-fi service in mostly on 4G network. The reason is that 4G is faster and the usage of 4G for data in Nepal is very low. With the high speed, there will be faster consumption of data and it ultimately deduct the balance. So making the use of 4G in providing wifi services without touching its existing 2G network (used for voice call) is a best way, the telecom’s will provide this service.

Conclusion: Telecom’s motive towards ISP’s indicates the huge market due to higher network coverage and millions of subscribers. But, due to higher pricing, it seems to be feasible for certain group and class. Lets wait and watch further.