All this seems irrelevant now, but 2 weeks ago, the government’s Sunday newspaper ran a rambling article about telecom reforms, that was in part a personal attack on Rohan Samarajiva, but mostly an assault on the reform process itself. The tables that were central to the article had been produced by Mr K.K. Gunawardene, former Director of the Department of Telecommunications (state-owned integrated monopoly until 1991), more recently with the ITU’s Bangkok office. These tables are unfortunately not reproduced in the online edition of the newspaper. The attached response was submitted to the editor of the government newspaper, but was not published.
Monthly Archive for December, 2004
The body count is way over what everyone thought. The volunteers are working like crazy. The flaws in the government’s relief efforts are beginning to show. The LIRNEasia response is given in the attachment. Also attached is a scanned copy of Rohan’s interview with the leading Sinhala daily on disaster preparation.
The wind was not held back
Below is a talk given 6 years ago entitled “To hold back the wind.” That was an attempt to get disaster preparedness going. It failed, obviously. The walls of water came in with no warning; thousands died instantaneously; millions are homeless. Parentheses refer to 9/11 in the US for scale: in a few hours on the 26th of December more that 17,900 (3,000) died out of a population of 19 million (280 million). More than a million are homeless (mostly office space was lost). More will die due to epidemics caused by thousands of unburied corpses, bad water, etc. (insignificant). This is just Sri Lanka. LIRNEasia’s immediate focus is the Bay of Bengal region. We have lost over 40,000 people…
Dear friends, well-wishers and partners of LIRNEasia, all members of the LIRNEasia team based in Colombo are safe. Despite the devastation wrought by the tsunami over most of coastal Sri Lanka on Dec 26, our office is functioning.
Sarvodaya is grass-roots organization that has been around for 47 years and is doing an incredible job of getting relief to the tsunami victims. They have an extensive network of volunteers and stations in 34 Sri Lankan towns, including the most heavily damaged. Although they are busy providing temporary shelters, drinking water, food and medicine to tsunami victims, they are also gearing up for medium and long-term rehabilitation that includes reconstructing homes, providing trauma counselling, preventing outbreak of disease and providing a home to the orphaned children. Sarvodaya accepts donation…
Rapid Response Unit:
LIRNEasia’s response to Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s Consultation Paper 16/2004: Growth of Telecom Services in Rural India: The Way Forward (October 27 2004)
Rapid Response Unit:
In response to a consultation paper, ‘Reassigning/Allocating Spectrum in the 800/900 MHz Bands‘ in Octoer 2004, LIRNEasia submitted its comments.
Subsequently, the TRC issued a response to this, with their comments, and request for further comments and views. LIRNEasia has responded with the following letter and attachments [1 & 2]
contains an interesting interview with Bill Melody and two other items worth reading. A new publication of the Mexican regulatory agency, COFETEL.
Worth thinking about: Bill’s central point is that the new regulatory agencies must have flexibility. He says their managers must have expertise, independence, capacity, etc.: “they must be informed and sophisticated market managers focused on using market tools strategically as their principal weapon in achieving pubic interest objectives.” Given the difficulties, nay impossibility, of achieving these good qualities in real-world regulatory staff, is this going to create more harm than good?
Call-for-Papers
A well developed information infrastructure is critical to the emerging knowledge society. Arguably, it is the availability of network-based development toolkit that enables consumers to generate value for the suppliers in the so-called reverse economy scenario. Similarly, it is the availability of ubiquitous Web-based information access that provides deep support to individuals in the new paradigm of distributed capitalism. It might not be extravagant to claim that a sustainable knowledge society, to a great extent, relies on a sophisticated information infrastructure.
As part of the information infrastructure, mobile communication has developed at an extraordinarily high speed in both developing and developed countries. In 2002, the total number of mobile phone users historically surpassed that of the fixed-line telephone users on a global scale. In the…
Sujata: summary too lenghty
Luxman: Since audience is EU needs to have language on ICT uplifting “masses” and “rural” access.
Malathy: Process element of regulation is not there?
Rohan: Study was originally for investor study and language taken from WTO language leaving out the independence of regulator. Process question will be in another study comparing different sectors.
Malathy: why cant process be built into current study?
Rohan: More questions you put in the response rate is poor.
Luxman: If performance indicator isnt ok, then need to know what is going wrong with regulator..
Rohan: If sector is doing well, why should I care if regulator isnt answering letters on time?
Sujata: Perception could be added for evaluating process regulator?
Amal: When respondents received questionnaire they thought it was too long. And deadlines keep slipping
Rohan:…
Rapid Response Unit:
14 December 2004
LIRNEasia made a short, but productive call on Nepals High-Level Commission for Information Technology (HLCIT) last week, to advise on jump-starting its e government and reform processes. The visit came within less than ten days of a request for Rapid Response assistance by Mr. Sharad Chandra Shah, HLCITs Vice Chairman.
In his three day visit, executive director Rohan Samarajiva conducted two key sessions, with HLCIT and decision making level representatives of government, private sector and civil society.
The first was a seminar, concerned with how Nepal can rapidly implement e-government initiatives, drawing on experience from Sri Lanka. Samarajiva discussed with the participants different approaches that Nepal could take and what would be most suitable for Nepal, whilst stressing the importance of strategic communication to support…
Pyramid Research
(December 2004)
The push for broadband in India has once again taken center stage with the country’s government formally announcing its broadband policy, and deciding, as many had predicted, not to accept the regulator’s proposal for local loop unbundling. Instead, the Department of Telecoms (DoT) has deemed that the last mile copper loop isn’t a bottleneck for the adoption of broadband services, and thus leaves it up to the state owned incumbents (BSNL & MTNL) to enter mutually agreeable arrangements with private parties for access to the last mile if needed. Together, both incumbents have 45 million copper loops, of which only 25% is adaptable for broadband application given the poor state of the copper plant in a majority of areas in India….
(go to full…
Rediff.com Dec 9, 2004
http://in.rediff.com/money/2004/dec/09telecom.htm
Telecom Regulatory Authority of India said on Thursday that the current access deficit charge of 11 per cent must be brought down to lower the tariffs and enable the sector achieve higher mobile growth like China.
The ADC is paid by operators to Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd mainly to undertake rural telephony services and currently stands at Rs 5000 crore (Rs 50 billion) a year.
“Unless you bring down ADC from the current level, pushing growth in the mobile segment would be difficult. ADC must come down to introduce lower tariffs and unless tariffs go down further, the kind of growth happened in China will not happen in India”, TRAI chairman Pradip Baijal told newspersons in New Delhi.
“Last year, there were 13 million mobiles……
The Economist Dec 2, 2004
http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3446429
…today almost all broadband connections in the world are fixed links provided either by telcos or cable companies. But in the next couple of years a handful of promising new wireless technologies, the best known of which is WiMax, will start to blanket large regions with broadband access over the airwaves.
This will be a huge boon to consumers, who will be able to bypass the broadband duopoly of cable and telecoms companies. It will also help the VOIP specialists by combining the benefits of VOIP with the convenience of wireless mobility (at least within regions with wireless broadband coverage). Vonage and others are already working with equipment vendors to make portable handsets based on short-range Wi-Fi technology, for use within homes…
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