The leading social network offered no details but its admission confirmed reports of a widening investigation into the misuse of private data by Facebook and its partners.

“We are cooperating with officials in the US, UK and beyond,” a Facebook spokesman said in response to an AFP query.

“We’ve provided public testimony, answered questions, and pledged to continue our assistance as their work continues.”

The Washington Post reported that the Securities and Exchange Commission, Federal Trade Commission and FBI as well as the Justice Department are looking into the massive breach of users’ personal data and how the company handled it.

Facebook shares closed the shortened Nasdaq trading day down 2.35 percent to $192.73, heading into an Independence Day holiday with investors mulling what effect the investigations may have on the California-based internet giant.

Facebook has admitted that up to 87 million users may have had their data hijacked by British consultancy Cambridge Analytica, which worked for US President Donald Trump during his 2016 campaign.

Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg apologized to the European Parliament in May and said the social media giant is taking steps to prevent such a breach from happening again.

Zuckerberg said at a hearing in Brussels that it became clear in the last two years that Facebook executives didn’t do enough to prevent the platform “from being used for harm.”

Zuckerberg was grilled about the breach in US Congress in April.

It remains unclear what if any penalties Facebook may face from the latest requests but the tech giant is legally bound to comply with a 2011 consent decree with the FTC on protecting private user data.

Any SEC inquiry could look at whether Facebook adequately disclosed key information to investors.

The glitch active between May 29 and June 5 has been fixed, according to Facebook, which has been striving to regain trust in the aftermath of a Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal.

“We know that the ability to block someone is important,” Facebook chief privacy officer Erin Egan said in a blog post.

“We’d like to apologize and explain what happened.”

Blocking someone on Facebook prevents them from seeing posts in a blocker’s profile; connecting as a friend, or starting Messenger conversations.

Blocking someone also automatically “unfriends” the person.

“There are many reasons why people block another person on Facebook,” Egan said.

“Their relationship may have changed or they may want to take a break from someone posting content they find annoying.”

People are blocked for harsher reasons, such as harassment or bullying, Egan added.

The software bug did not restore any severed friend connections at the social network, but someone who was blocked could have been able to reach out to a blocker on Messenger, according to Facebook.

“While someone who was unblocked could not see content shared with friends, they could have seen things posted to a wider audience,” Egan said of the glitch.

The vast majority of the more than 800,000 people affected by the bug had only one person they had blocked be temporarily unblocked, according to Facebook.

People affected by the bug will get notifications encouraging them to check their blocked lists.

Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg earlier this year was grilled by the European Parliament and the US Congress about a massive breach of users’ personal data in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Facebook admitted that up to 87 million users may have had their data hijacked by British consultancy Cambridge Analytica, which worked for US President Donald Trump during his 2016 campaign.

Japanese tech giant, Line Corporation, has committed to making major investments in key new areas deemed to have much potential, including financial technology (fintech) and artificial intelligence (AI). The company, last week at its annual conference, made an official announcement to “redesign” all of its services, both current and new.

The redesign will focus on the relationships between Line’s services and users, and the concept will be embedded into all Line services from now on. The company sees “redesign” as a concept anchored in a new vision and was the theme of Line Conference 2018, held in Tokyo, Japan last week.

Takeshi Idezawa, Line Corporation president CEO, told the conference that the company would now shift much of its investment and effort to create many new services, including fintech and AI.

Blockchain technology is the next big thing for Line Corp’s investments, with the company making plans to incorporate blockchain technology throughout its business.

“We will use blockchain technology to establish a token-based economy to redesign the relationship between users and services. Users and services will be involved in a co-creation. The ‘Line token economy’ is built on Line’s blockchain platform. Tokens issued by Line will be used not only for Line’s services, but also to enable others to easily take part in the Line token economy concept. Line token economy is the vision and is under development,” said Idezawa.

“We put a lot of investment in new areas, included AI and fintech, especially blockchain. The financial sector is the most important focus sector for us. We aim to tackle the payment services in the Asia region, which mostly depend on cash. We can learn from the China market, where they have had success in smartphone payment, but for our business model we will not follow them. Based on our service, we are getting more data from transactions and we can utilise that data for our users,” said Idezawa.

He said the company is redesigning financial services to enable participation by the huge number of people who do not have bank accounts are unable to access financial services.

The company will also redesign its commerce services, as it seeks a large increase in growth, and also redesign the AI voice assistant.

“These three are the next huge challenges for us and we will put a lot of effort in these,” said Idazawa.

Idezawa said Line Corp’s revenue in 2017 was 160 billion yen (Bt47 billion), around half derived from advertising with the rest coming from games and stickers.

Japan, Thailand, Taiwan, and Indonesia are the key markets, with a combined 165 million users and offering Line huge potential for growth. The company uses “hyper-localisation” as the its key strategy to optimise Line’s assets in each potential market.

He added that Line has teams dedicated to blockchain research and development, and sees a need in continuing to educate the market and recruit more talent expert in blockchain technology.

“AI, fintech, and blockchain are areas in which we are looking for a lot more talent,” said Idezawa.

Line Blockchain Lab was established in April as a research organisation within the company and tasked with designing and developing dApp services. Then in May the company founded “unblock” as a subsidiary to develop token-economy related technologies, and joined a global blockchain project called “ICON”. Line also announced, “BITBOX”, its cryptocurrency to cryptocurrency global exchange, which supports more than 30 coin types and is available in 15 languages. Bitbox will launch this month.

Smart portal 

In its redesign of the company and its services, Line will move beyond being primarily a messenger service company to instead position itself as a “smart portal”, a vision it first announced in 2016, said Jun Masuda, director and chief strategy marketing officer. “We are not a messenger company and do not rely on messenger services,” Masuda insisted. “In the market, our messenger service is strong and is our fundamental infrastructure. We will continue to add on new features and new services. But in the markets where our messenger is not strong, we will approach with other new services. For example, B612 is quite successful in the Chinese market.”

Idezawa said that as a “smart portal”, Line Corp already offered communication and content services, and now is the time to move to offering financial services including securities, themed investments, insurance, virtual currency, loans, asset management and more.

For example, Line Corp has joined hands with Folio to provide asset management services starting sometime in 2018 in Japan. It also worked with Nomura to establish Line Securities Corporation to offer asset management services. And, it collaborated with Sompo Japan Nipponkoa to offer non-life insurance services. It also plans to launch Line Kakeibo, a personal financial management service, in the near future.

As for artificial intelligence, Line continues to work on bringing extensions of its AI assistant Clova to the market. Masuda said that Clova will come in more characters such as Doraemon and Minion and will be more connected to home appliances under the smart home concept. It has also joined hands with Toyota to launch Clova Auto as an AI assistant for cars.

Line Thailand 

Ariya Banomyong, managing director of Line Thailand, said the hyper localisation strategy will be followed here, including the focus on fintech and AI and the launch of content and some services to the Thai market in the second half of 2018.

“The big differentiator for Line is we are doing technologies to reach people and to smoothly embed them into their daily lives. We are a tech company with humanity,” said Ariya.

The Line Ad Platform is being redesigned for launch in the Thai market soon and AI and other fintech services are tentatively scheduled for a 2019 launch in the local market.

“Thailand is a very important market for Line; we are the second-fastest growing market following Japan in terms of the number of active monthly users. We have 42 million users and dominate with penetration of 95 per cent of Internet users in Thailand,” said Ariya.

Line is also the dominant platform in Thailand, with an average 63 minutes daily spent on Line during the average 216 minutes per day spent on smartphone.

Line has positioned itself as smart portal, with Thailand offering users six groups of services –games, content, online-to-offline (Line Man), business solutions, payments, and other new services.

“All services we offer to Line users in Thailand, are done under our hyper-localisation strategy. For example, Line TV and Line Today are successful services. Line TV has already become the number one TV re-run platform, while Line Today has become the number one news portal in terms of the number of publishers (120) and in having 32 million monthly active users. Moreover, Line Man is also the number one brand in terms of awareness compared to competitors,” said Ariya.

For Payment, Rabbit Line Pay, a joint venture company between Line Thailand, Advance Info Services (AIS), and Rabbit, aims to become the number one mobile payment in Thailand.

Redesigning services 

At the Line Conference 2018, the parent company also announced many services now being developed under the redesign concept. For example, Line Music Video and Line Ticket are new services to be launched in the Japanese market after its success with the Line Music service. Line Music is the leader in Japan’s music streaming market. Line Music is also very popular, with over 9.7 million monthly active users. It offers more than 46 million songs and has around 1.3 million monthly ticket users.

In Japan, music streaming in the first quarter of 2018 hit a 49 per cent share of music distribution sales, already surpassing downloads with a share of 44 per cent.

“Line is changing artists’ business model from downloading of their CDs to experiencing streaming and events,” said Masuda. And Line Ad revenue is also healthy, said Masaki Hamura, executive officer and head of advertising business strategy for Line Corporation. Line Ad revenue grew from 6 per cent in 2012 to 40 per cent in 2017.

Meanwhile, the combined total of Line Official Accounts and Line@ Accounts topped 2.5 million in June 2018. Line Ads Platform, Line Sales Promotion, and Line Accounts Connect have been redesigned to both appeal to emotions and provide benefits. In Thailand, there are around 2 million Line@Accounts and 240 Line Official Accounts. Ariya said that local user would soon see the redesign of the Line Ads Platform for the Thai market.

Finally, Line Pay has also been redesigned under a “payment revolution” concept. It started from its home-based Japanese market, where it redesigned payment infrastructure for small and medium business, which are the majority shops in Japan. It offers zero investment for initial set-up costs and zero transaction fees for three years from August 2018 to July 2021.

It has also launched a QR Code payment app for SMB, Line Pay for Merchants. In order to attract a greater numbers of users, it offers incentives of 3 to 5 per cent using QR/barcode payment.

As the nation’s main organisation responsible for forecasting weather changes and natural disasters, TMD is constantly looking to improve the technology supporting its prediction modelling.

The department needed a technology boost using high performance computing to fine-tune the accuracy with which it delivered weather predictions in the present, short and long term. It sought to improve efficiency, portability, maintenance, scalability and productivity in the department’s Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) Model, which supports atmospheric research and operational weather prediction

TMD selected Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Apollo 2000 servers, featuring the unique capability to store data using HPE 3PAR, a world-class storage array designed to

work seamlessly with HPE Apollo.

Boonlert Archevarahuprok, senior meteorologist, Thailand Meteorological Department said that the HPC-supported WRF system is expected to help TMD forecast rainfall within a four-square-kilometre spatial resolution and forecast weather more than seven days in advance, by month or by season.

The high-performance

computing system would also help deliver intelligence that will help TMD support the development of government policies in areas such as sustainable water management and improve overall protection against natural disasters.

“HPE stood out with an innovative hybrid IT solution that met our needs and delivered a solution that helped us support our mission-critical business functions and deliver on the needs of the country,” said Boonlert.

Palasilp Vichivanives, managing director, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Thailand, said the TMD was looking for a solution to manage unpredictable mixed workloads to enable accurate weather forecasting.

The company’s customised solution delivers a flexible, scalable and cost-effective configuration for the TMD to accelerate performance of their mission-critical applications and improve forecasting, he said.

As we have already seen, some so-called “secure” jobs have recently been replaced. For instance, bank tellers are largely replaced by ATM and online banking; online customer service personnel are replaced by chatbot.

A number of the world’s most influential people believe that in the foreseeable future all jobs will be lost to machines and all human beings will be living on basic welfare.

However, I’m a strong believer that there will still be some jobs where a robot will never be able to beat people, especially those requiring compassion and a human touch such as psychologists and caretakers. Moreover, as humans and machines have different strengths, even though a machine can beat a human one-on-one in Go and in online games, several studies have proved that complicated tasks are best handled by a team that has both machines and people working together.

Nonetheless, it’s inevitable that substantial numbers of jobs will be lost. There will be huge unemployment in the coming five years. So, how can we prepare ourselves not to be one of those left unemployed?

First, we must perform exceptionally well at whatever we do.

Even in a repetitive job that machine a might have done better, such as cleaning a toilet, an exceptional cleaner like those employed at Japanese airports who consider themselves serving customers with an exceptional level of service, won’t be replaced by a robot.

And to do that, you need to be passionate about your job.

Second, we need to never stop learning, acquiring new skills, and to keep challenging ourselves and pushing our boundaries. Those with continuous self-improvement will definitely be less likely to be replaced.

Even if unfortunate things happen, you will already be comfortable in being uncomfortable and ready to learn new things to perform well in your next job.

Third, we need to possess a growth mindset and always take feedback and suggestions as gifts. No matter where they come from, bosses, mentors, parents or even subordinates, we should listen to them and use them to make us a better person. If you can make potential employers want to hang out with you, your chances of landing a job will skyrocket. Fourth, we need to keep ourselves up to date, especially about new careers. It will help you prepare for your next move before it’s too late.

Above all, know what you want in life and which types of careers can serve your goals and personal core values. Because when you are working in a career that can serve your personal core values, you will be fulfilled and more likely to be passionate about the job and perform exceptionally well.

In order to know this, you might use the Career Design Framework developed by CareerVisa to analyse yourself and careers in five shades: skills and interests, personality and people you want to be surrounded with, working conditions, lifestyle and personal core values.

To analyse your target careers, you need accurate information and insights from professionals with real work experience in the field. If you don’t know where to start, visit the CareerVisa Thailand Facebook fanpage. https://web.facebook.com/careervisathailand/

Thiraya Thiranakanat is co-founder and chief executive officer, CareerVisa Digital, a start-up in dtac Accelerate batch 6.

The new Managed Private Cloud solution offers new consumption options for more flexible access to powerful IT infrastructure and applications as customers modernize their data center for hybrid cloud, Cisco said in a press statement.

FlexPod Datacenter for Epic EHR, a key healthcare application, is the first in a series of new pre-tested vertical solutions, with support for more healthcare applications, coming soon. FlexPod continues to be a platform for innovation and investment protection, introducing new validated solutions for the latest virtualization software, enterprise applications, and databases incorporating the latest technologies from Cisco and NetApp, the statement added.

According to IDC, Cisco and NetApp have recorded market-leading growth with FlexPod, showing double-digit, year over year growth for five successive quarters.

Managed Private Cloud

The new Managed Private Cloud solution built on FlexPod enables customers to realize a cloud-like, As-a-Service model for their on-premises IT. The FlexPod infrastructure would be located on-premises but managed remotely, securing critical customer data and advancing cloud-capabilities for both partners and their customers. This solution will be delivered by channel partners. Initial delivery partners include Dimension Data,  ePlus, Microland, and ProAct and as the program evolves it would expand to a larger set of partners.

FlexPod Industry Solutions

New FlexPod industry solutions provide a proven platform to quickly deploy key applications across industries that are challenged by the increasingly diverse, dynamic and distributed nature of data.Launching today, FlexPod Datacenter for Epic EHR simplifies IT infrastructure for healthcare customers, helping them move faster and unleash new insights for improved patient care. Together, NetApp and Cisco are providing customers with a secure, reliable, and highly available platform for their most business-critical applications by providing best practices and sizing guidance to reduce risk and accelerate deployments. Additional solutions will extend support to other applications and industries later in the calendar year.

Platform for innovation

FlexPod continues to be a platform for innovation and investment protection with the release of newvalidated designs that address customers’ most pressing business needs. In addition to the new healthcare and managed private cloud solutions, new designs have been released across the FlexPod Datacenter portfolio. This proven FlexPod platform for IT modernization has been refreshed for both VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V environments incorporating the latest technologies from Cisco UCS, Cisco ACI and NetApp All Flash FAS storage. The SAP and SAP HANA solution, foundational for several successful enterprise customers and service providers offering Hana-as-a-Service, was refreshed in May 2018. New solutions have also been released for desktop virtualization (Citrix XenDesktop/XenAppand VMware Horizon View) and Microsoft SQL 2016. Additionally, the new NetApp IP based MetroCluster can be combined with Cisco ACI to form a single fabric spanning active-active datacenters for a robust Business Continuity solution. Learn more about FlexPod validated designs and their multitude of benefitshere, the statement added.

“We wanted to use technology to reinforce our commitment to innovation in patient care,” said Austin Park, Epic Infrastructure Team Leader at LCMC Health. “We’ve exceeded all expectations of the best possible patient care scenarios by running Epic EMR on our FlexPod with AFF infrastructure. With rapid, secure access to patient data, our caregivers can respond to patients’ needs quickly, armed with the right information.”

“It’s no surprise that FlexPod continues to lead the market as the fastest growing converged infrastructure solution,” said Ranjeet Sudan, vice president of Converged Infrastructure at NetApp. “Our long-running relationship with Cisco has combined best-in-class technology and expertise to create one of the strongest and most successful partnerships in the industry. Together, we are enabling organizations to truly access the full value of their data despite the rising complexity of applications and workloads.”

“We are proud of our continued innovation with NetApp as we further expand FlexPod’s powerful capabilities with support for industry-specific applications and new consumption models,” said Siva Sivakumar, senior director, Data Center Solutions, ‎Cisco Systems. “With these new offerings we are helping organizations accelerate deployment of their business-critical applications and providing a secure, robust, and flexible private cloud infrastructure that has the speed and simplicity of public cloud.”

“As a global leader in both systems integration and managed services for hybrid IT, Dimension Data is excited to add the new FlexPod Managed Private Cloud service to our portfolio of hybrid services,” saidRob Lopez, group executive, Digital Infrastructure for Dimension Data. “Our enterprise clients across 47 countries demand on-premises cloud solutions that improve business agility, simplify business processes and reduce time-to-market, as well as offer assured confidence from partnering with leading technology providers, such as Cisco and NetApp. Ensuring we deliver an exceptional end-to-end Managed Private Cloud solution to our clients, along with our market-leading security and networking services, enables us to help accelerate their digital transformation journeys.”

“With operations in the U.S., U.K., and India, we provide advanced technology solutions optimized by professional and managed services to drive meaningful business outcomes for our multinational and commercial customers. We are proud to build upon our long-standing partnership with NetApp, including status as NetApp’s FlexPod Partner of the Year, and expand our portfolio to include Managed Private Cloud. We look forward to continuing to support customers throughout their cloud journey, helping improve business agility and enable technology innovation with an intuitive solution to provide self-service consumption, increase flexibility, reduce complexity, and also provide support to the entire solution of on-premises private clouds as they modernize their IT infrastructure,” said Sudheesh Subhashithan, Vice President Cloud Services at ePlus.

“The new Managed Private Cloud solution enhanced and configured with Microland’s managed services enables us to further accelerate digital transformation, drive profitability, improve efficiency and advance process and system effectiveness for customers across Asia, Australia, Europe, Middle East and North America,” said Pradeep Kar, CEO of Microland.

“As one of the first and largest FlexPod Premium Partners in Europe, we have used Cisco and NetApp technology for many years in our enterprise class managed services. We are therefore thrilled to add the new Managed Private Cloud solution to our portfolio, giving us even stronger capabilities to efficiently and effectively manage on-premises private clouds for our customers across Europe,” said Paul Bates, vice president for Managed Services at Proact IT Group.

Adding a way to check that a real person is behind new accounts was described by Twitter as being among measures to fight abuse, trolls, and hateful content.

“This is an important change to defend against people who try to take advantage of our openness,” Twitter executives Del Harvey and Yoel Roth said in a blog post.

The requirement will be rolled out later this year, and Twitter promised to make sure the change does not harm aspiring users in “high-risk” places.

Twitter recently began taking more steps to clean up spam and automated activity, and “close the loopholes they’d exploited,” according to Harvey and Roth.

“We’re also now automating some processes where we see suspicious account activity, like exceptionally high-volume tweeting with the same hashtag, or using the same @handle without a reply from the account you’re mentioning,” they said.

Twitter systems identified and challenged more than 9.9 million “potentially spammy or automated accounts” weekly in May, according to Harvey and Roth.

Twitter last month said that it was stepping up its long-running battle against online trolls, trying to find offenders by looking at “behavioral signals.”

The new approach looks at behavioral patterns of users in addition to the content of the tweets, allowing Twitter to find and mute online bullies and trolls.

Even if the offending tweets are not a violation of Twitter policy, they may be hidden from users if they are deemed to “distort” a conversation, Twitter said.

Twitter already uses artificial intelligence and machine learning in this effort but the latest initiative aims to do more by focusing on the actions of certain users in addition to the content.

Twitter is among online platforms under pressure to do more to safeguard against being used to spread misinformation or promote division, as proved the case during the US presidential election in 2016, in which US intelligence says Russia meddled to help Donald Trump win.

The endtoend system will make Thailand one of the few nations able to fully exploit geoinformation for societal benefits. Fully in line with Thailand’s 4.0 policy, the THEOS2 programme will constitute a major milestone in the development of Space in the Eastern Economic Corridor and its Digital Park.

As part of the contract, a comprehensive capacity building programme will involve Thai engineers in the development of an integrated geo information system, ground segment and two Earth observation satellites: a very highresolution and a small satellite system. The small satellite system from Airbus’ subsidiary SSTL will be assembled and tested incountry by Thai engineers to deliver technology transfer and involve local suppliers. This will be complemented by an extensive training scheme capitalizing on Airbus’ comprehensive geointelligence expertise, and will further develop Thailand’s geospatial industry, said Dr. Anond Snidvongs, Executive Director of GISTDA.

Industrial enterprises are the largest contributor to Thailand’s economy, while industrial IoT products and services are more mature, featuring several solution providers in this space with extensive experience in implementing IoT solutions for industrial companies.

The manufacturing segment is the single largest contributor to Thailand’s economy when compared to its contribution to other Asean economies.

Irza Suprapto, CEO of solution provider Asia IoT Business Platform, said Thailand should first and foremost focus on IoT solutions for the largest economies – which in Thailand is the manufacturing sector. The government has identified that potential and is making both hard and soft investments to ramp up companies along the technological curve.

The Thailand 4.0 policy has highlighted opportunities and investment trends in 10 targeted industries, divided into two broad categories. They include the first five S-Curve industries (general automotive, intelligent electronics, advanced agriculture and biotechnology, food processing, and tourism) where the country’s competitiveness can be enhanced through building on its current strengths through technological innovation. Also targeted are the five new S-Curve industries (digital, robotics and automation, aviation and logistics, biofuels and biochemicals, and medical hubs) where the aim is to develop those industries to accelerate the new industrial growth base.

“The enterprises under the industrial verticals are most advanced in exploring and/or implementing IoT solutions,” says Suprapto.

With these investments and developments, the IoT industry in Thailand is expected to be worth US$1 billion by 2020.

The most obvious potential for Thai enterprises implementing IoT solutions is through productivity gains. Thailand has lagged behind its Asean peers in improving productivity and proper adoption of IoT solutions should help enterprises bridge this gap. Increased productivity would also make Thailand a more attractive location for foreign investments.

“This is the fourth consecutive year hosting the Asia IoT Business Platform event in Bangkok and we have seen a reduction in the inertia exhibited by enterprises in implementing IoT and digitisation projects,” says Suprapto.

His company’s annual survey of Asean enterprises discovered that cost is less a concern here compared to in other Asean nations, while security issues rank as the largest obstacle to higher adoption rates of IoT solutions among Thai enterprises.

Establishing the right ecosystem is key to IoT implementation taking off in any Asean country, Suprapto said. The four key stakeholders within an ecosystem are governments, telecommunications companies, solution providers and local enterprises.

Governments can contribute to creating the right ecosystem through crafting policies that increase the solution options available to enterprises and by promoting their adoption by providing both financial and non-financial supports. For example, Singapore has spent a lot of resources to promote its Smart Nation Programme globally to attract international companies to get involved in local projects.

Thailand has formed the Ministry of Digital Economy and Society to track how digital transformation projects affect the growth of both the economy (businesses) and society (people). In Thailand, the ministry has set the target for the digital sector to contribute 25 per cent of the country’s GDP.

Telecommunication companies play a key role through ensuring strong connectivity, be it Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) or traditional bandwidth. The extent of their IoT strategy has differed vastly between telecommunication companies in Asean.

Thailand’s telecoms launched their NB-IOT networks earlier this year and Suprapto said it will be interesting to see what types of solutions will use this standard going forward.

Large solution providers target each Asean country differently, and the breadth and depth of the solutions they are able to provide within each country also differs. Asean economies continue to outpace global growth rates and the larger technology vendors have started to commit additional resources to increase their product and service offerings in the region.

Local enterprises need an ecosystem that encourages them to make investments in IoT and the three stakeholders singled out above will play key roles in providing the impetus for Asean enterprises to adopt IoT solutions.

“IoT implementation isn’t the same as a traditional enterprise IT product purchase decision,” said Suprapto, “and enterprises need to invest a fair bit of resources to adopt IoT successfully.

“Having supportive policies, strong connectivity infrastructure and leading-edge technology minimises the risks business leaders [are exposed to] in adopting IoT projects.”

He added that the role of his company’s Asia IoT Business Platform is to help encourage IoT adoption in Asian countries. The programmes in Asean over the past five years have evolved in line with the nature of the IoT industry.

“Southeast Asia cannot be ignored, as overall economic growth is expected to remain strong over the next few years,” said Suprapto. “You can also see that with the [increasing] number of vendors interested in providing IoT solutions to Asean markets, the growth in business opportunities is really quite impressive. The marginal cost of IoT solutions to enterprises declines as the number of technology vendors increases.”

The local Asean markets are mature enough to identify challenges unique to this part of the world. IoT adoption can be a key competitive advantage for firms wanting to stay ahead of the curve.

“IoT is not a problem which can be solved with a one-size-fits-all solution. Business models will have to adapt. This starts with having in-depth, honest discussions among stakeholders. And that is what we aim to provide,” said Suprapto.

Plans are being made to roll out 5G in Thailand between 2020 and 2022 and offering significant business potential for operators, said Nadine Allen, president and country manager of Ericsson Thailand.

“Specifically for Thailand, we forecast that operators can add service revenues of up to US$2.6 billion [Bt85 billion] or a 22 per cent increase in incremental revenues above forecast revenues by 2026. The largest opportunity for operator-addressable 5G-related revenues will be in sectors like manufacturing, energy and utilities, and public safety,” said Allen.

The Swedish multinational telecom company Ericsson is one of the leaders in pushing for adoption of 5G standards around the world.

Analysis of the available data indicates a general and long-term pattern of larger data plans attracting an increasing proportion of the customer base.

Ericsson’s analysis of data from App Annie indicates that in the period from April 2017 to April 2018, the proportion of subscribers with data usage above 5 gigabytes per month has grown from 46 per cent to over 58 per cent. Driving this shift is the growing data consumption by consumers, growing smartphone penetration and attractive data packages being offered by operators.

Meanwhile, mobile data usage continues to increase in Thailand with video and social media use largely driving this growth. Ericsson’s analysis of data from App Annie indicates that in the 12 months from April 2017 to April 2018, Thai users increased their mobile use of Facebook by 58 per cent while almost doubling their usage of Instagram.

Globally, major 5G deployments are expected from 2020. Ericsson forecasts over 1 billion 5G subscriptions for enhanced mobile broadband by the end of 2023, accounting for around 12 per cent of all mobile subscriptions.

Mobile data traffic is estimated to surge by eight times during the forecast period to reach close to 107 exabytes (EB) per month – a figure that is equal to every mobile subscriber worldwide streaming full HD video for 10 hours.

By 2023, more than 20 per cent of mobile data traffic worldwide is expected to be carried by 5G networks. This is 1.5 times more than the total 4G/3G/2G traffic today.

Following diffusion patterns of previous mobile access technologies, 5G is expected to be deployed first in dense urban areas with enhanced mobile broadband and fixed wireless access as the first commercial use cases. Other use cases will come from industries such as automotive, manufacturing, utilities and healthcare.

Fredrik Jejdling, Ericsson’s executive vice president and head of business area network, said that 2018 is the year 5G networks go commercial as well as for large-scale deployments of cellular Internet of Things (IoT). First-generation 5G data-only devices are expected from the second half of 2018.

The first commercial smartphones supporting 5G in the mid-band range are expected early next year, while support for very high spectrum bands is expected in early to mid-2019.

However, the forecast for cellular IoT connections has nearly doubled since November 2017. It is now expected to reach an estimated 3.5 billion in 2023, driven by ongoing large-scale deployments in China. New massive IoT cellular technologies such as NB-IoT and Cat-M1 are fuelling this growth, giving service providers opportunities to improve efficiencies and enhance customer value.

Mobile operators have launched more than 60 cellular IoT networks worldwide using these technologies over the same underlying LTE network to support a diverse range of use cases.

In North America, these cases are centred on logistics and fleet management while in China the focus is on smart cities and smart agriculture.

The first commercial launches of 5G will be this year. North America is expected to lead the 5G uptake, with all major US operators planning to roll out 5G between late 2018 and mid-2019.

By the end of 2023, close to 50 per cent of all mobile subscriptions in North America are forecast to be for 5G, followed by Northeast Asia at 34 per cent, and Western Europe at 21 per cent.