Hong Kong has some of the world’s fastest and best quality broadband.There are an incredibly competitive and intense market there. How can HKT achieve business success? Peter Lam, Managing Director of Engineering HKT, shared HKT's story with you.
Interview Transcript:
Light Reading (LR):
I’s sitting here with Peter Lam, Managing director of Engineering at HKT. Peter, Hong Kong has some of the world’s fastest and best quality broadband. You’ve got an incredibly competitive and intense market. But even so, at ten Gigabits per second as a home broadband services is very impressive. So how do you deliver that?
Peter Lam:
In 2015, we decided to uplift the speed from 1 to 10 at home. The reason of doing that is because of we see a lot emerging applications, like high density contents, 4K TV, or even this VR/AR type of bandwidth intensive application coming out. And we see that will be a big opportunity that the customer may need higher bandwidth.
LR:
And what are some of the challenges you’ve had in migrating the customers to 10G? And in deploying it in the first place?
Peter Lam:
The challenge firstly is on marketing selling. You know some of the European countries they only have a few Mega service. 1G in Hong Kong is already very very high speed. But still they will always ask the question “why do we need 10G?” And we said “10G, of course you need that.” Because some of the special applications like gaming, home office that type of application really really you need higher bandwidth at home.
And in terms of deployment, it’s not that difficult. Because 10G is actually mostly based on the 1G infrastructure. What we need to do is we just change the termination modem at customer premises. And to re-do some of the engineering works in our network. It’s like a value add incremental investment.
LR:
And now inside the customer premises, you’re offering a set of services called “smart living.” Tell us about those.
Peter Lam:
Maybe back to 4 or 5 years ago. When we had done this terrific connectivity fiber to the home service. We start to realize we should move away from this purely connected service. Because we should move up the value chain. Like based on the broadband, we can provide home Wi-Fi service. And yes, I have to mention now the E-health because of the elderly society we’ve become. E-health has become a very popular customer service requirement at home.
LR:
And how do you think this smart living services will evolve in the future?
Peter Lam:
I will think, it will be more on E-health, as I mentioned earlier. Hong Kong population is like Japan, the other country become age. And the need of this E-health service become more and more popular. And we see a lot of new start-up company, the device company, they’re doing a lot of this gadgets for E-health.
LR:
And of all those different services, which would be the most popular?
Peter Lam:
I would say Wi-Fi is the No.1. So most people at home, they will switch the mobile phone to use the home Wi-Fi. A large house, we can use three or a pair of this device. And it can roam seamlessly among them. So that you can provide a full house ubiquitous Wi-Fi coverage. And we see this Wi-Fi ubiquitous coverage is number one people want.
