Wi-tribe and Packet One International sign HOA to boost Asian WiMAX industry

The Asian WiMAX industry received a further boost with the signing of a Heads of Agreement (HOA) between Wi-tribe and Packet One International (P1i), the international WiMAX global services arm and associated company of Packet One (P1) in Malaysia.

The HOA paves the way for a collaborative partnership on multiple fronts to strengthen the WIMAX industry in Asia particularly to derive and implement best practices for both service providers to significantly boost WiMAX user and customer experience.

Sami Hinedi, Wi-tribe’s Group CEO, said:

“Being major players in the consumer wireless broadband arena, this partnership gives wi-tribe and P1i the opportunity to share a lot of information, which can have tremendous mutual benefit. The HOA will enable Wi-tribe and P1i to share best practices and lessons learnt in product and service development, sales and marketing strategies, and improvement of network performance, customer care and support.”

This agreement will allow Wi-tribe and P1i to explore and share information related to the industry. It will allow both companies to improve in a large number of areas such as customer care; sharing best practices and lessons learned in analysing and improving customer satisfaction and experience. Another major area of understanding will deal with regulatory authorities and how service providers can better cooperate to lobby regulators, deal with non-company topics and respond to regulatory consultations and inquiries.

Commenting on wi-tribe’s recent activities Sami added, “Wi-tribe now has presence in Jordan and Pakistan, and we expect to launch in Philippines soon. The Asian and African markets have tremendous growth potential for broadband services and at Wi-tribe we are constantly looking at new opportunities to expand our presence and offer a convenient, flexible and hassle-free internet experience to our customers.”

“Wi-tribe and P1’s core strategic thrust is to provide a superior customer experience. P1 is Asia Pacific’s first and world’s largest 802.16e 2.3GHz WiMAX network operator and service provider (outside of Korea). It is fast approaching its 100,000 subscribers mark having only launched commercial services in August 2008. As the international global services arm, P1i constantly record and help formulate its best practices to better serve customers; improve service levels and deliver exceptional value through attractive packages and solid networks,” commented Dr PS Tang, Managing Director of P1i.

He added, “This is the basis of our collaboration with wi-tribe, to further enrich each our knowledge resource pool.”

Both Wi-tribe and P1i have extensive experience in acquiring, developing and operating WiMAX networks and hope to accelerate the growth of WiMAX ecosystem in their regions of interest through this collaboration.

via AMEinfo


  • wi-tribe with only 8-9000 subscribers in Pakistan at present (4 months after launching its service in June) is doing worse than Wateen.
    wi-tribe has service in only 3 metros unlike 25 cities in case of wateen. Wimax is a losing business case. As long as you have to subsidize a $150 CPE and tariffs are below costs, wimax will be a losing business. Although Wateen has crossed 100,000 wimax customers, it’s still not being profitable because of high costs of a wimax network both on core and access side. That’s why Mobilink/Orascom has stopped investing in wimax. Also, Nokia Siemens has decided to stop investing in Wimax R&D any further. The future is LTE, not Wimax. So stay away from Wimax.

    • @ Farrukh

      wi-tribe launched in 4 cities (rwp and isb are independent of one another).

      just a little review for you:
      wi-tribe: 8000 users/4 mo= 2000 users/mo (from 4 cities) = 500 users / city
      Wateen: 100,000 users/26 mo = 3,846 users/mo (from 25 cities) = 154 users / city

      If we just play with these numbers (which are questionable, but for the sake of argument we’ll keep them), we can see that only 4 months into launch (all of which have not expired), wi-tribe has over 3x wateen’s numbers.

      Wateen’s growth is taking into account over 2 years of market presence, first to market advantage among numerous other factors that are built over time. If wi-tribe only had 3 cities, the per city average # of users would be 667/city (rounded off)

      Then, as you said yourself, 25 cities – another thing that didn’t happen overnight. They launched in 22 cities before expanding service. Part of making any business model successful requires organic growth. Although in a slump now, if they keep investing, they may grow in numbers once the odds even out. Their issues with billing and service led them to the low success rate, two tangibles any wateen customer can account for.

      Let’s give wi-tribe at least a year before making any calls on progress. LTE has a long way to go before it’s success can be substantiated.

  • Dear Farrukh,

    Also to correct you wi-tribe has 11,000 sales in 3 months making it around 4000/month and wateens claim of 100,000 doesn’t take into account the churn that is around 20,000. Now lets make calculations. I agree with Cyrus, lets give wi-tribe some chance.


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