Seven Asia-Pacific operators are forming an alliance to offer joint roaming and marketing services to customers. FET (Taiwan), Hutchison Essar (India), Hutchison Telecommunications (Hong Kong and Macau), KT Freetel (South Korea), DoCoMo (Japan), Indosat (Indonesia) and StarHub ( Singapore) are the operators that have set up this roaming alliance.. In a statement, they stated that it is expected that through this alliance, multinationals as well as business and leisure travelers will be able to enjoy greater convenience, ease of use and value-added mobile features when they roam onto other members' mobile networks.
The alliance, tentatively called the "Asia-Pacific Mobile Alliance," boasts a combined customer base of about 100 million mobile subscribers over eight countries and regions. The alliance plans to expand its members over time.
The alliance will promote voice, video and data roaming via members' GSM/GPRS and /or W-CDMA networks, with an intention to launch roaming via HSDPA networks once the market is ready. These initiatives are targeted for launch in the latter half of 2006.
One of the other aims of this alliance is to create a Virtual Home Environment amongst customers of member operators, so that they are able to experience seamless, convenient mobile-related services when they roam. Customers can expect a caller ID display service, as well as a short-code service to allow travelers quick and easy connection to their home country/region operator's voice mail and customer-support center, etc. The alliance is also planning to enhance cross-border customer support for multinational corporations."
Posted to the site on 25th April 2006
Posted to: www.cellular-news.com/story/17100.php