Summary
Macau, a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China, remains very low profile compared with its bustling sister SAR, Hong Kong. The country has quietly built itself a strong modern telecoms infrastructure, the equal of any country in the region, with very significant penetration of telecom services.
While fixed lines reached an effective saturation point a few years ago, the country's mobile market has been growing strongly and had become one of the most highly penetrated in the world. Macau has been busy adopting the Internet and the administration appears keen to encourage this. Broadband Internet, using mainly DSL, has been developing quickly.
The territory of Macau has a fully integrated telecom network which compares well with the best in Asia. The last remaining Portuguese colony in Asia, Macau reverted to Mainland Chinese rule in December 1999, becoming a SAR of China. The Macau Government privatised its telecommunications system very early on-in 1981-and chose Cable & Wireless to operate and expand the service.
As fixed-line numbers plateau and decline, the mobile telephone market has taken off strongly. There were over 900,000 mobile subscribers by end-2008, representing a penetration rate of over 180%. In the meantime, fixed-line penetration was languishing below 35%.
Rapid growth in the mobile sector can be attributed to the opening of the mobile market in August 2001 to two new operators, providing competition to Macau Telecom. The licences allowed Hutchison and SmarTone to provide and operate mobile networks based on 2G technology and the transitional 2.5G technology platforms.
Further competition entered the market in 2005 when the government awarded mainland China mobile giant China Unicom a licence to set up a CDMA network in Macau. The move by China Unicom into the Macau market was the first example of a Chinese telecom company setting up a network outside the mainland. Macau Telecom's market share had dropped to just over 40% by end-2008.
By late 2006, Macau had awarded 3G licences to Hutchison Telephone Macau and CTM to provide WCDMA services. This was followed by China Unicom winning a licence in 2007 to provide services based on the alternative 3G standard CDMA2000 1x EV-DO. In late 2008, the China Unicom brand changed to China Telecom Macau, following restructuring of the telecommunications industry in China.
Mobile communications and Internet-related services look like continuing to be among the better performing segments of the industry, boosted by the partial liberalisation of Macau's telecom services market. A new contract between the government and CTM signed in 1999 has allowed gradual and partial liberalisation of the market (mobiles, Internet and other Value-Added Services) to take place.
Table of Contents
1. Executive Summary
2. Key Statistics
3. Telecommunications Market
3.1 Overview of Macau's telecom market
4. Regulatory Environment
4.1 The regulator
4.2 Liberalisation
5. Major Player in the Market
5.1 Compahnia de Telecomunicações de Macau (CTM)
6. Telecommunications Infrastructure
6.1 Domestic and international
7. Data Market
7.1 Data network
7.2 Macaupac
7.3 Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN)
8. Internet Market
8.1 Overview
8.1.1 ISP market
8.1.2 Licensing of Internet services
9. Broadband Market
9.1 Overview
10. Convergence
10.1 Overview of the broadcasting market
10.2 Cable TV
10.3 Satellite TV
11. Mobile Communications
11.1 Overview of Macau's mobile market
11.1.1 Mobile statistics
11.2 Mobile technologies
11.2.1 Push-to-talk (PTT)
11.3 Major mobile operators
11.3.1 CTM
11.3.2 Hutchison Telecom Macau
11.3.3 SmarTone Mobile Communications (Macau) Ltd
11.3.4 China Unicom
12. Related Reports
Table 1-Country statistics Macau-September 2008
Table 2-Telephone network statistics-December 2008
Table 3-Internet user statistics-December 2008
Table 4-Broadband statistics-December 2008
Table 5-Mobile statistics-December 2008
Table 6-National telecommunications authorities
Table 7-Number of operators by service-March 2009
Table 8-Fixed-lines and teledensity-1991-2008
Table 9-Internet users-1996-2008
Table 10-Internet subscribers-1996-2009
Table 11-Growth of online household computers-2003-2007
Table 12-Broadband subscribers and households-December 2008
Table 13-Broadband subscribers-2001-2009
Table 14-DSL subscribers-2001-2008
Table 15-Broadcasting statistical overview-2007
Table 16-Mobile subscribers total and prepaid and penetration rate-1990-1996; 1998-2009
Table 17-Mobile subscribers by operator and annual change-December 2008
Table 18-Mobile subscribers 2G and 3G-2008-2009
Table 19-Local SMS statistics for Christmas, Lunar and New Years holidays-2008-2009
