An excerpt from a trade newsletter published by the Govt of India:
According to the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM), the apex body for software services in India, the revenue of the information technology sector has risen from 1.2 per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in FY 1997-98 to an estimated 5.8 per cent in FY 2008-09. Further, the industry body expects the sector to grow between 4 per cent and 7 per cent during 2009-10 and return to over 10 per cent growth next year. India’s IT growth in the world is primarily dominated by IT software and services such as Custom Application Development and Maintenance (CADM), System Integration, IT Consulting, Application Management, Software testing, and Web services. Moreover, according to a study by Springboard Research, the Indian IT services market is estimated to remain the fastest growing in the Asia-Pacific region with a CAGR of 18.6 per cent.
Despite the uncertainty in the global economy, the top three IT majors—Infosys, TCS and Wipro—have seen revenue growth from all important sources of income: from the North American and European regions, in the financial services vertical and from application maintenance and development (ADM) offerings between ..read more
Perhaps it is time for Sri Lanka Telecom Regulator to be renamed ‘Telecom Revenue Commission’ as it generates more revenue for the government than two state banks and Port and the Petroleum Corporation, suggests Rohan Samarajiva in his column to Lanka Business Online. The 3.5 billion rupee question: Does it regulate?
The answer may interest the new boss, Anusha Palpita, who took over the reins few days back. “There is no problem with the administrative aspects, but I will have to get a grip on the technical side of TRCSL’s functions and duties”, he said to The Island- Sunday Edition yesterday. “As financial management is my forte, I need to study the technical factors involved”.
The new Director General is going to run the TRC on a part-time basis, writes Samarajiva, in addition to running the government information department. He too does not appear to have any special expertise in telecommunication or in regulation. With the part-time, ex officio Chair being the most over-burdened official in the country, the Secretary to the President, one wonders who is actually going to run the TRC. Or perhaps the thinking is that it is beyond redemption. Is it that the Special Committee to ..read more
LIRNEasia will be releasing the beta version of the Mobile AT Tester software on 13 February 2010. All bloggers (Sinhala/Tamil/English) are welcome to participate the event. The soft launched is at Renuka City hotel and will commence from 9:30 am to 12.00 noon followed by lunch.
For further informaton please click here.
Admission Free but seats. PRIOR REGISTRATION IS MANDATORY.
By Aileen Aguero, former Research Intern, LIRNEasia
As an intern at LIRNEasia, I had the opportunity of working with Harsha de Silva in writing a paper called Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) Expenditure Patterns on Mobile Phone Services in Selected Emerging Asian Countries. I presented this paper at the Pacific Telecommunications Conference, held on 17 – 20 January in Honolulu, Hawaii. The 2010 edition of this conference tried to emphasize the benefits innovation provides as well as the challenges faced by developing economies in connecting the unconnected and the adequate provision of systems and services.
Our paper was part of Breakout Session 7: Building for Sustainability – ICTs in the Developing World, held on 19 January (paper and slides available
here). Elizabeth Fife, Bruce Baikie, Laina Reveendran and Laura Hosman were also part of this panel. The presentation included a discussion of the importance of mobile phone services in developing countries as well as the justification and objectives of this paper:
To study BOP mobile service expenditure patterns in Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand and the Philippines.
To determine if this service is a luxury or a necessity in economic terms.
The basic concepts of economics used in the analysis included Engel’s Law, the Engel
..read more
As part of LIRNEasia’s 5th year anniversary conference, “research -> policy -> knowledge based economies“, a photo exhibition was commissioned at the event to capture different aspects of the use of mobile phones by those at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP). The images which were sourced from Flickr from both budding as well as professional photographers (and used with their permission), showcased the varied nature of mobile connectivity and use facing the people of Asia from the BOP.
An online gallery has been created to as a companion to the actual exhibition and can be viewed HERE.
Voice and Data has done a story on spectrum hoarding. Among the main sources is Payal Malik, who did the spectrum/licensing study that was part LIRNEasia’s mobile 2.0 work.
According to Payal Malik, sr research fellow, LIRNEasia, “It is difficult to verify whether the spectrum is actually being hoarded, but given the way allocation has taken place, I won’t be surprised if it is. In an effort to eliminate competition, the existing players inflate subscriber numbers. To add to this, the verification process is difficult and has to be done by Trai which has not done anything about this issue till date.” She adds, “Only 5-7 MHz on an average is the bandwith provided per operator, which is very little when compared to the 10-11 MHz allocated abroad. This in turn leads to fragmentation of spectrum.”
Looks like it is too much a job for an ordinary committee. The special committee will miss the special guidance of Mr. Priyantha Kariyapperuma, Director General of Telecommunication Regulatory Committee of Sri Lanka, who tendered his not so special resignation yesterday, but the regulator giving some special attention to broadband quality is good news.
We reproduce the news story in today’s Daily News below. (Sorry for the scan quality. Online text is not available.)
ICTA’s version: Government initiative to develop high speed broadband Internet.
It was neither a devastating earthquake nor a synchronized terrorist attack. Yet the mobile phone network in the city of Noida, a prosperous neighborhood of 700,000 inhabitants nearby New Delhi, was collapsed last Saturday. Thanks to the “dutiful” local authorities shutting down around 25% of the base stations, which were claimed to be breaking planning permits.
“Electricity supply to the towers has been cut and the back-up generators have also been sealed. Only 125 cellular service providers had submitted applications requesting an extension a few months ago. These would be spared for the moment,” boasted Sandeep Chandra, senior project engineer, Noida Authority.
The authorities claim that the phone companies were given notice of the clampdown if they didn’t seek the necessary authorisation for the towers to be erected. Depending on the reports between 125 and 190 towers have been shut-down out of a total tally of 400 and 572 towers in the city. Hindustan Times reports.
Twitter is developing technology it hopes will prevent the authoritarian governments being able to censor its users. Evan Williams, the chief executive and co-founder of Twitter, which has been credited with helping anti-government protesters in Iran to organise resistance, said software developers were working on “interesting hacks” to stop any blocking by foreign governments.
“We are partially blocked in China and other places and we were in Iran as well,” he said. “The most productive way to fight that is not by trying to engage China and other governments whose very being is against what we are about. I am hopeful there are technological ways around these barriers.” Read more.
The world’s fastest txters are South Koreans, followed by US and Argentina. What does this mean for the Philippines status as SMS Capital of the World?
The inaugural Mobile World Cup, hosted by the South Korean cellphone maker LG Electronics, brought together two-person teams from 13 countries who had clinched their national titles by beating a total of six million contestants. Marching behind their national flags, they gathered in New York on Jan. 14 for what was billed as an international clash of dexterous digits.
To ensure a level playing field, LG handed out identical mobile phones — one with a numeric keypad and the other with a keyboardlike QWERTY pad — weeks in advance for practice. The basic rule of the competition: copy phrases streaming across a monitor correctly, with the required capitalization and punctuation, as quickly as possible. Whichever language players chose, words were selected so that each would type the same number of characters.
The applications are developed, the hardware is ready. Who is not ready are the spectrum managers/regulators of Asia, who have barely started on refarming. Already some of Sri Lanka’s mobile data users are complaining that they cannot connect. The operators need to pay attention and so do spectrum managers.
America’s advanced cellphone network is already beginning to be bogged down by smartphones that double as computers, navigation devices and e-book readers. Cellphones are increasingly being used as TVs, which hog even more bandwidth. They can also transmit video, allowing for videoconferencing on cellphones.
And a new generation of netbooks, tablet PCs and other mobile devices that connect to cellphone networks will only add to the strain. “Carrier networks aren’t set to handle five million tablets sucking down 5 gigabytes of data each month,” Philip Cusick, an analyst at Macquarie Securities, said.
Wireless carriers have drastically underestimated the network demand by consumers, which has been driven largely by the iPhone and its applications, he said. “It’s only going to get worse as streaming video gets more prevalent.”
It is disappointing to see sirens still being promoted despite the demonstrated problems. And I think Kogami was present at the HazInfo dissemination event we held in Jakarta.
Patra Rina Dewi, director of the Tsunami Alert Community (Kogami), a nongovernmental organisation working on disaster mitigation training for communities, said the knowledge people most need is whether an earthquake has the potential to become a tsunami.
The current standard for this is an earthquake that occurs less than ten kilometres below the seafloor and is recorded as more than seven on the Richter scale.
“But this kind of information should be translated into easy information for the people,” said Patra.
She added that the most effective warning method is sirens, but these are often of limited number and can be heard only at a distance of about one kilometre.
In most countries (few exceptions being North Korea, Burma/Myanmar, Papua New Guinea), mobile penetration is broad enough that cell broadcasting would be superior. Not that you cannot have a few strategically placed towers so the objectives of security theater and commissions from construction can also be satisfied.
LIRNE.NET (through Research ICT Africa) together with University of Cape Town’s Infrastructure Management Programme, is organizing a five-day training course in telecom regulatory reform. The course is to be held from 12 – 16 April 2010, at the UCT GSB Breakwater Campus, V&A Waterfront in Cape Town, South Africa.
The course is designed to enhance the strategic thinking of a select group of decision-makers in telecom and related sectors in developing countries and emerging economies. The aim of the programme is to address the many challenges posed by the current stage of telecom and ICT reform to governments, regulatory agencies, operators and other stakeholders.
The faculty on this course includes the course convenor, Research ICT Africa Director,
Alison Gillwald, also former broadcasting and telecommunications regulator in South Africa; CEO of LIRNEasia,
Rohan Samarajiva, COO of LIRNEasia,
Helani Galpaya and financial economist
Christoph Stork, Research ICT Africa’s senior researcher.
More information on scholarships available
here.
For more information, please contact Junita Abrahams on +27 (0) 21 406-1323 or abrahams[at]gsb.uct.ac.za or go to http://www.researchictafrica.net/index.php/training or www.gsb.uct.ac.za/telecoms
Bangladesh exported 50 percent less manpower in 2009. Thousands of jobless workers also returned home as their employers went broke after the Wall Street collapsed. Yet inward remittance grew by 20 percent ($10.72 billion) in 2009. How could fewer workers send the highest-ever remittance? The mobile networks covering nearly 100 percent of the population as well as the landmass (without USF) has enabled this miracle. Read more.
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