Monday August 2, 2010
By B.K. SIDHU
bksidhu@thestar.com.my
PETALING JAYA: Jalenas Sdn Bhd has hired three foreigners to lead the company to help it deliver its promises of a open access high-speed broadband network to the nation after over a year’s delay.
The company appointed James Angelone as its CEO, Niclas Sonesson as the chief technology officer/chief operating office and Boyan Krosnov, the director for network operations recently.
Angelone has spent nearly 30 years in the telecoms industry of which 22 were in the Asia-Pacific region. He has worked in various positions with different companies.
James Angelone ... ‘We are only looking at US$10mil funding.’
He started with AT&T in the United States, moved to Lucent Technologies Inc and later to PacketFront, Jazz International Marketing and BroadSoft Korea.
His latest post before Jalenas was vice-president, global sales and marketing with Samsung SDS in South Korea. He holds an MBA in Business Management from the Almeda College & University in Idaho, United States.
Angelone is confident that with his expertise and that of his other colleagues, Jalenas will be able to roll out services for consumers in the country.
“With proper network planning and the right partners, we would be able to roll out fibre to 300 homes in Kuantan by end-October,” Angelone said in an interview.
Sonesson, the CTO/COO, was co-founder of PacketFront AB (a open-access solution provider). He had connected and serviced the first 130,000 homes in less than one year for a national deployment of fibre to the home (FTTH) project in Sweden. He is a telecommunications and home electronics engineer.
Krosnov, the man who will be involved in network operation is a network engineer by profession and was involved in the fibre network deployment in Iceland.
PacketFront is one of two partners Jalenas has teamed up for an open access solution. The other is Maipu (Sichuan) Communications of China for equipment supplies. It is also in talks with several other parties such as Cisco to roll out its network. It may use Tenaga Nasional Bhd poles for FTTH.
“We want to work with partners that are willing to be committed with the project. We believe in what we are doing. We will only work with professionals as we cannot afford to make mistakes since this is a privately-funded project,” Angelone said.
On how Jalenas would fund its network build-up, he said: “Funding will always be challenging, but once we have (part of) the network up, we would get there. We are only looking at US$10mil funding for the initial stages, so the outlay is small and we are also working with partners,” he said.
Despite such optimism that it can source funding and deliver FTTH to 300 homes by end of October, the sceptics are not convinced as this is a capital-intensive business that comes with long gestation period and having the financial muscle in this game will be critical.
“Let me put my team in and we will turn everything upside down for the network roll-out. But we have to grow from small to big. We have to grow through the phases and we will source for funding at the same time,” he said.
Jalenas is a joint venture between High Speed Broadband Technology Sdn Bhd (HSBT) and Pahang Government subsidiary Pahang Technology Resources Sdn Bhd. It has a paid-up capital of RM10mil.
Jalenas and its parent company HSBT have an ambitious plan to invest RM10bil to wire up 2.5 million premises in Malaysia.
HSBT pitched to the Government in 2008 for a privately-funded second network but was turned down with the rationale that Telekom Malaysia Bhd (TM) was the only company capable of rolling out such a capital-intensive project.
In February, Jalenas said it would wire up Kuantan with high-speed broadband, but only a km of fibre had been laid around the city thus far.
On having to work alongside incumbent TM, Angelone said “it will be an uphill battle but the company wants to prove the sceptics wrong”.
http://biz.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2010/8/2/business/6770922&sec=business
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