Telco market gets crowded

The Malaysian telco scene--with three incumbents--is suddenly getting crowded with two new upstarts.

Tune Talk, a Mobile Virtual Network Operator, has just announced that it has a new CEO--Jason Lo, a famous local musician.

He might seem like an unlikely choice for the CEO of a telco but at least he can think out of the box.

Tune Talk's main challenge is how it's going to differentiate itself from the incumbents (it definitely can't afford to fight a price war with them).

Another up-and-coming telco U Mobile, which has a 3G licence, will be receiving an investment of US$200 million from Japan's NTT DoCoMo and South Korea's KTF.

Given that the incumbents have failed to make much headway with their 3G service offerings, I wonder how U Mobile can be any different.

Having DoCoMo as a shareholder might bode well for U Mobile though. Maybe it might be able to learn from DoCoMo's success with mobile data services in Japan.

Who knows, maybe Tune Talk and U Mobile might be just the catalyst that the incumbents need to wake them up from their value-added-services slumber.