Vodafone trials NB-IoT in Melbourne
Australia’s third largest operator Vodafone partnered with Chinese equipment vendor Huawei to conduct pre-standard trials of Narrow Band-IoT (NB-IoT), which is designed to boost coverage at lower power compared with existing mobile technologies.

The operator held trials at several sites in Melbourne last month and is planning more trials in other cities in the coming months.

Vodafone CTO Benoit Hanssen said it achieved significantly greater coverage both in terms of distance and depth, compared with those offered by existing 2G, 3G and 4G technology.

New iPhone to feature Intel modem chips
Intel will supply about half of the modem chips for the next iPhone model due for release in September.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and testing firm King Yuan Electronics will manufacture the chips for Intel, which will package the modems, DigiTimes reported.

Qualcomm currently supplies the LTE modem chips for the iPhone.

World Bank: 90% of Bangladeshis not online
According to a World Bank report, about 90 per cent of Bangladesh’s population, or as many as 148 million people, don’t have access to the internet.

The World Bank’s World Development Report 2016: Digital Dividends ranked Bangladesh fifth lowest in terms of internet availability of the countries covered in the report.

But according to the country’s telecoms regulator BTRC, Bangladesh had more than 61 million internet subscribers as of March, the Dhaka Tribune reported.

The country has a population of about 160 million.

SKT, Telkom cooperate on IoT services
South Korea’s SK Telecom (SKT) and Telkom Indonesia agreed to work together to develop new business initiatives in the area of smart cities and Internet of Things (IoT) services.

SK Telecom will introduce its IoT platform ThingPlug and share its knowhow in deployment and operation of LoRa networks, with the aim of jointly developing IoT technologies and services that are tailored to the Indonesian market.

The two operators will also discuss creating a joint venture for their IoT businesses over the next two years.

Alibaba, SoftBank create cloud venture in Japan
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and Japan’s SoftBank have set up a venture to offer cloud computing services in Japan using technology developed by Alibaba Cloud.

SB Cloud Corp will open a data centre in Japan and provide public-cloud computing services for Japanese customers, ranging from startups to multinational companies. The joint venture will enable Alibaba Cloud to expand its cloud service platform to SoftBank’s broad enterprise customer base in Japan, Alibaba said in a statement.

With demand for public-cloud services growing rapidly in Japan, SB Cloud will provide Japanese enterprises with a range of services, including data storage and processing, enterprise-level middleware as well as cloud security.

Dialog invests $125M to expand networks
Bangladesh’s largest mobile operator Dialog Axiata is investing $125 million this year to expand its mobile and pay-TV networks nationwide.

The operator, with a 42 per cent market share, aims to boost pay-TV users to one million this year from the current 700,000. Dialog’s digital pay television business reported a loss of LKR182 million ($1.23 million) in Q1 due to higher customer acquisition costs as it aggressively pushed to expand its customer base.

Last week the company reported its net profit for the quarter increased 35 per cent to LKR2.7 billion from a year ago on revenue of LKR21.2 billion, which was up 22 per cent.