Monthly Archives: December, 2006
Applications now open for LIRNEasia Young Scholar Tutorials, hosted by NUS, Singapore. Click here for info on how to apply.
Cable and operator redundancy for Sri Lanka
Until 2005, Sri Lanka had one undersea cable (if one did not count the aged SEA-ME-WE 2) and one operator controlling access to it.
Then came SEA-ME-WE 4 and the BSNL cables. More cables, but still one operator, SLTL. Now finally, we have operator redundancy. This should be sweet music to the BPO industry.
Lanka Bell, one of Sri Lanka’s privately held wireless telecom operators, has tied up with India’s FLAG Telecom to lay an undersea cable linking both countries.The 27 million dollar deal will see a third landing on the cable that currently runs from India to the Maldives, Lanka Bell’s Director, Damien Fernando said.
Beyond cheap coverage
Nov 13, 2006 By Tony Chan, Wireless Asia
http://www.telecomasia.net/article.php?id_article=2622
This article raises the important question of affordability of access to services on mobile networks versus services on fixed networks (e.g HSDPA versus broadband). Some pertinent questions raised include:
Does coverage mean cheaper access to telecommunication services? While it very well might be cheaper for governments to provide mobile coverage to rural areas, are the ongoing costs of access cheaper as well?
Although the author doubts whether users in rural areas of emerging Asia can afford even the cheapest mobile packages ($5/month) that we are paying today in Hong Kong, the 2005 Shoestring research proved otherwise, with 34 % spending USD4-8 on mobile services, and 30 % pendingmore than USD8 per month –significant proportions of their monthly household incomes (below USD100). Similarly, the 2006 Shoestrings research is revealing high expenditure numbers at the bottom of the pyramid.
Mobile multiple play
Just returned from the sensory overload of the ITU Telecom World exhibition and forum in Hong Kong. One of the buzzwords/phrases floating around this year is multiple play. Triple play is passe though a few are hanging on with quadruple play.
Given my recent column in LBO, my mind was on payments. Where in the multiple play talk was payments? This was the question I raised at the session.
Now, as I wade through the piled up e-mail, I find this fascinating link sent by our good friend Randy Spence which is dead on the point. Does this not suggest that payment is the truly hot topic?
Sunday Independent: Cellphone companies push the power of mobile business services to hook consumers
Hylton Kallner, the general manager of marketing for Discovery, said the company was about to launch a pre-paid funeral plan, which costs R40 a month and could be purchased as a consumer buys cellphone airtime.”Cellphone penetration in South Africa is among the highest in the world, and is especially strong in the LSM 1-5 brackets at which this product is aimed. We decided to piggyback on the knowledge and habits of a ..read more
Indonesian Minister proposes new initiatives to stimulate Internet growth at ITU World 2006
The Indonesian Minister for Communication and Information Technology, Dr Sofyan Djalil, presented a number of new initiatives for removing the barriers to Internet growth in his country at Building Digital Communities forum session at the ITU World 2006 event in Hong Kong on December 7, 2006.
Divakar Goswami, LIRNEasia’s Director, Organizational and Projects, who was moderating the panel asked the following question: One of the first achievements of your government was to delicense the 2.4 GHz frequency that allowed communities to use Wi-Fi extensively in the country. Despite that, Indonesia currently has Internet penetration of 0.69 percent. You have about 124 ISPs that operate in Indonesia. How do you explain the low penetration and what are the barriers preventing Internet from growing faster in Indonesia? When we look at broadband sector we see that penetration is even lower. What are the barriers that can be lifted so that this sector can grow?
Minister Sofyan Djalil:
There are a number of barriers to Internet growth that we have identified and we will solve in short period of time. One of the bottlenecks is international fiber optic cables. Right now the international capacity is low and price of international bandwith in Indonesia is very high. ..read more
LIRNEasia at International Telecommunication Union Telecom World 2006
Rohan Samarajiva and Divakar Goswami, chaired sessions at the first Telecom World event , ITU Telecom World 2006, to be held in Asia, in Hong Kong SAR, 3-8 December 2006. This event, held once in four years, is normally held in Geneva. It was moved to Hong Kong to recognize the leading role of the Asia Pacific in the ICT sector today (see Figure 1).Samarajiva and Goswami were the only persons from Sri Lanka featured in the program of the Forum at Telecom World.
Goswami, lead researcher on LIRNEasia’s Indonesia ICT sector and regulatory performance study, chaired a session that included keynote presentations by Dr Sofyan Djalil, the Indonesian Minister of ICTs. Samarajiva’s session on universal access included keynotes by the Vice President of China Unicom, Dr Zhengmao Li, and Tom Philllips, the Head of Regulatory Affairs at the GSM Association.
LIRNEasia has an ongoing research program that covers India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand, in addition to capacity building work across the entire Asia Pacific. The invitations to chair the said sessions demonstrated the high recognition that LIRNEasia has achieved in the two years of its existence. Samarajiva and Goswami ..read more
India mandates access regime for cable landing stations
India’s Department of Telecom (DoT) has mandated non-discriminatory access to international cable landing stations which are an essential facility for a host of international data and voice services. VSNL has agreed to open three landing stations to all operators on a non-discriminatory manner. LIRNEasia has been pushing for having access regimes in place for telecom infrastructure bottlenecks like cable landing stations and backbone in a number of countries we work in. Hopefully, this will be emulated in other countries in the region. DoT will also introduce resellers for international bandwidth in order to further bring down international bandwidth prices since the liberalization of the international gateway (IGW) in 2002. Currently, there are four operators that own IGW and there are eight submarine cables landing into the country. At least five other cable systems are expected to land in India in the near future. Although, there is enough international capacity (over 18 terabits, 1 terabit lit), there is not enough price competition for international bandwidth. Introducing resellers will hopefully lower bandwidth prices further. The article below states that in the USA, out of 32 bandwidth providers, 26 are resellers. This is also the case in many EU countries where the operators of ..read more
Software Issues in Sri Lanka Part 6
Please continue discussion from Software Issues in Sri Lanka Part 5, on this thread. This thread is devoted to diverse software issues discussed in the context of Sri Lanka. Please stick to the topic and keep the discussion civil.
Previous discussion is archived in the following threads:
Standardizing Sinhala for IT Part 4 Standardizing Sinhala for IT Part 3 Standardizing Sinhala for IT Part 2 Questioning ICT MythsLIRNEasia website assessment gains traction
LIRNEasia regulatory website assessment has been mentioned prominently in an official Pakistan government document, The Economic Survey 2005-06 from the Ministry of Finance
“Best Regulator’s Website Of Asia Pacific Region
LIRNEasia is a regional ICT policy and regulation capacity building organization funded by IDRC and infoDev of World Bank. The organization evaluated 27 websites from the Asia Pacific region covering 62 economies. The website of PTA was declared as the best website among all the national websites of regulators of Asia Pacific and regional economies. The website was declared best on the basis of availability of legislative & consumer information, future plans, continuous updating, user friendliness, links to external sites and availability of information on mission statement, organizational chart, contact and online forms.”
Colloquium on Pakistan’s Telecommunication Sector
As part of the Six Country Indicators Project, Joseph presented the interim findings from the Pakistan country study (over Skype). The study assesses Pakistan’s telecom sector and regulatory performance. It employs the common methodology and list of indicators adopted for the Six Country study.
Indian Ocean tsunami detection buoy
Early warning regarding tsunamis depends on skilled interpretation of earthquake data from seismic monitors like the one at Pallekale and data from ocean based buoys that detect fast moving bodies of water.
The ocean between Sri Lanka and Thailand now has one. It is up to us to make sure that the warning that get communicated from international and regional warning centers will be communciated to the affected communities promptly and that those communities will be prepared to respond properly.
NOAA Provides First Tsunami Detection Buoy for the Indian Ocean: Financial News – Yahoo! Finance
Following a ceremony in Phuket, Thailand, where the 2004 Boxing Day event caused the most extensive tsunami damage in Thailand, the MV SEAFDEC set sail today to deploy the buoy about mid-way between Thailand and Sri Lanka. NOAA scientists and engineers are onboard to provide technical assistance during the launch operations.With funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), NOAA built and provided the DART station on behalf of the U.S. government. The buoy will be maintained by the Thai Meteorological Department and National Disaster Warning Center. The station’s data will be available to all nations through the World Meteorological Organization Global Telecommunications System ..read more
Is there a future for international voice?
Here is what Telegeography has to say on the subject:
Computer-based Voice over IP (VoIP) is nothing new, but Skype is the first such service to break into the mainstream, attracting millions of users worldwide. Skype had 1 million simultaneous users within six months of the release of its first version for Windows in July 2004. By the end of the third quarter of 2006, Skype had 136 million registered users, and the number of users online now regularly exceeds 8 million. These users generated about 6.6 billion minutes of traffic in the third quarter of 2006, and are on track to make over 27 billion minutes of PC-to-PC calls this year. About half of Skype’s traffic is international.
This has prompted worries that Skype–and similar services–could undermine the viability of the international long-distance market. However, while the volume of international traffic routed via Skype is significant, the quantity is still small when compared to a global switched and VoIP traffic base of 264 billion minutes. Computer-to-computer traffic between Skype users in 2005 was equivalent to 2.9 percent of international carrier traffic in 2005 and approximately 4.4 percent ..read more
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