PCCW's director of broadband services marketing Monita Leung says giving customers what they want is the main ingredient in its formula for success
Telecom Asia: PCCW seems to have a lock on the broadband prize. What has been the key to your consistent success‾
Monita Leung: I would have to say it is PCCW's reputation for quality, stability and top customer service, coupled with our innovation, in bringing new value-added services that people really want.
Our success in broadband is just part of a wider telco transformation strategy for PCCW. We have delivered Hong Kong's first quadruple-play, offering multiply access options for unrivalled content, programming and interactive services on broadband but also on fixed-line, mobile and TV.
Our value-added broadband services include our online music-streaming service MOOV, and a multimedia photo album service called snaap, which provides a platform for user-generated content. Customers can take photographs or movie clips with their mobile phones and upload them to their own secure folder in a central server, accessible from all their devices, mobile phone, now TV, Internet and broadband fixed-line phone.
To strengthen and support our broadband service more, we are expanding our Wi-Fi wireless high-speed network throughout Hong Kong, with 3,000 hotspots to be installed by mid 2007.
For the new services, particularly HD TV and video, how much bandwidth is needed and what is PCCW's plan to make this available‾
now TV customers can use interactive functions such as now Ticketing to buy movie tickets and Stock Market Express for stock quotes, nowShop for purchases including Dial-a-Dinner and now Select servicesto replay certain programs and movies, via their remote control.We plan to launch high-definition service on now TV.
We deliver at 6 Mbps for standard definition (one box per line). Our objective is to deploy ADSL2+ and VDSL to provide 18 Mbps for HD and multiple STBs off one line. Video is the main driver. VoD requires no extra bandwidth in the local access line but requires more backhaul bandwidth, and we are constantly building to support demand. Interactive services are not as bandwidth-hungry, so provisioning for video is more than enough.