China’s No.1 mobile wallet app, Ant Financial, which is an affiliate of Alibaba Group, has made its move to penetrate the South Korean payment platform market with a $200m investment. However, it’s just the latest in a number of significant overseas investments the Chinese company has made in recent months.
Consumers in Thailand have been given a boost following the official announcement of the launch of ‘Samsung Pay’ in the region from the Korean mobile giant. The cashless payment service has in fact been running in a limited number of outlets in an ‘early access’ fashion for the best part of a year.
Reliance Jio, India’s newest telecommunications operator has reached an agreement with US global ride-sharing platform Uber - which will enable passengers to pay for services by utilizing the operator’s new application. The Indian 4G newcomer have recently launched an application called JioMoney which is a digital wallet.
Inmarsat, the global mobile satellite communications provider, has announced a key infrastructure milestone for its European Aviation Network (EAN), following the successful test and validation of the EAN Satellite Access Station (SAS).
The Federal Communication Commission has approved the landing license for the state-of-the-art Southeast Asia - U.S. (SEA-US) fiber cable system. This key milestone enables the connection between the United States and Indonesia.
Chinese telecoms giant ZTE Corporation, together with Indonesian service provider Smartfren Telecom Tbk, successfully completed the Pre5G Massive MIMO service test. This is Southeast Asia's first field commercial trial of Pre5G technology that could support technology evolution from 4G to 5G, demonstrating Smartfren’s continuous leadership in 4G technologies to the benefit of its customers.
Uber drivers protested in Taiwan circling the country’s transport ministry on February 10 after the ride-hailing company halted its operations in the island nation following an impasse with the government of Taiwan which deems the service illegal.
Australian mobile operator Optus has launched native Voice over WiFi – or WiFi Calling – which allows customers to easily make and receive calls, SMS and MMS where there is limited mobile coverage but an accessible WiFi service, such as home or public
Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, announced that it has expanded its data center in Hong Kong by more than doubling the capacity to address the increasing demand for secure and scalable computing services in Asia Pacific.
M1 Limited (M1), Singapore’s third largest mobile carrier, and Huawei announced on 18 January that they had successfully achieved Singapore’s highest 5G transmission speeds of 35Gbps. The demonstration, at M1’s main operating centre in Jurong, is part of Huawei’s long-term commitment to the successful deployment of 5G network by the year 2020.
