Saturday, 6 July 2013

Layoffs for GTT/Inteliquent

Not long after the acquisition by GTT of Inteliquent, a major layoffs was carried out. They layoff up to 30-40% of the ex-Inteliquent staffs sometime last month including some of the founding members based in Italy. Many of the critical support staffs are gone which left customers in the lurch and confused.

Looks like no industry is safe and surely not Telecommunications. A pity and farewell to the once rising star called Tinet. This blog posting is a tribute to that little company that challenges the giants of the Telecommunications world.


Myanmar Picks Telenor and Ooredoo

The win by Telenor is expected as they are really strong contender and operates several mobile operations around the world, including a few in Asia. They also owns DTAC (Thailand), Digi (Malaysia), Grameenphone (Bangladesh), Uninor (India). Most of which are doing very well except Uninor. 

The dark house is surely Ooredoo which is formerly Qatar Telecom. This is a surprise as one would think that it has to be the japanese. Their PM came recently and waived off all the debts plus pledging new loans. If I am KDDI, it must surely hurt. Well, this is not the first time the Japanese was trying to leave some legacy in this country. Remember the Burma Railway (aka death railway)? That's the most famous or infamous contributions here.  I think the debt the Japanese owes to Asia is far more that whatever they can write off. 

However, one wonders how does Ooredoo won it then. Could it be related to any of the Oil or Gas potential Myanmar has? Qatar definitely has the oil and gas expertise and Myanmar the untapped supply....That's got to be even more profitable than Telecommunications. We shall see soon....

Anyway, congratulations to the 2 winners to one of the very last frontier of Telecommunications (the other one may be North Korea).