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 BUSINESS ONLINE - LBO
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.
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,…
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,…
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…
Tags: Broadband, broadband wireless, fiber optic, Hong Kong, Indonesia, information technology, Internet penetration, Internet service, Jakarta, LIRNE asia, optic based network, Sidney, Sofyan Djalil, telecommunications, Wi-Fi.
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.
Figure 1: 
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,…
Tags: Asia, Asia-Pacific, China Unicom, Divakar Goswami, Geneva, GSM, GSM Association, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, International Telecommunication Union, Johannesburg, Korea, Pakistan, Philippines, Rohan Samarajiva, Sofyan Djalil, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tom Philllips, United Kingdom, United States, Zhengmao Li.
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.…
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:
One hour warning possible for tsunamis originating from the Sunda Trench. What we do with that one hour is the key question.
People’s Daily Online — Nations progess on tsunami detection
Thailand launched the first of 22 US-made tsunami-detection buoys to be positioned around the Indian Ocean as part of a regional warning system against giant waves caused by earthquakes under the sea.
The satellite-linked deep-sea buoy, unveiled at a ceremony on the tsunami-hit island of Phuket, will float 1,000 kilometres offshore, roughly midway between Thailand and Sri Lanka.
“This will give us the capability to provide 1 hour warning to most of the countries in the northern part of the basin,” Curtis Barret of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.
Washington donated the buoy, but Thailand will…
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.”
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.
Tags: Balochistan, Blackberry, Broadband, cents, corporate mobile email solutions, EDGE, fixed and mobile telecom services, free on-net text services, GPRS/MMS, Internet access, Internet subscribers, law/policy, Long Distance, Pakistan, SMS, Telenor, United States, USD, video conferencing, wireless local loop.
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…
Tags: Boxing Day, communications upgrades, DART station, dissemination systems, India, Indian Ocean, Indonesia, Maldives, National Disaster Warning Center, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Phuket, Sri Lanka, Thai Meteorological Department, Thailand, U.S. government, United States, United States Agency for International Development, World Meteorological Organization, Yahoo!.
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…
In 2004, 4.1 percent of Sri Lankan households had computers. As the data comes in from our six-country study, we will post the numbers for those countries as well.
Looks like this will change the nature of the debate. The report states that Intel and Microsoft are not happy with Negoponte’s baby.
For $150, Third-World Laptop Stirs a Big Debate - New York Times
Mary Lou Jepsen, the chief technologist for the project, likes to refer to the insight that transformed the machine from utopian dream to working prototype as “a really wacky idea.”
Ms. Jepsen, a former Intel chip designer, found a way to modify conventional laptop displays, cutting the screen’s manufacturing cost to $40 while reducing its power consumption by more than 80 percent. As…
Tags: Argentina, Brazil, Debate - New York Times, Intel, Libya, Mary Lou Jepsen, Microsoft, Nigeria, operating system, Taiwan, Thailand, USD.
As part of the Six Country Indicators Project, Deunden presented the interim findings from the Thailand country study (over Skype). The study assesses Thailand’s telecom sector and regulatory performance. It employs the common methodology and list of indicators adopted for the Six Country study.
Very good.
Now will the Indian government walk the walk?
Will the other countries take the lead?
Govt. committed to develop a robust disaster management system: PM
Addressing the First India Disaster Management Congress here, Dr. Singh called for a paradigm shift in disaster management from a “relief-centric” and “post-event” response.
Pointing to the draft National Policy on Disaster Management, he said that it placed greater emphasis on efficient management of disasters, rather than focusing only on immediate response to disasters.
“Such an approach should place emphasis on improving early warning systems, ensuring the reach and efficacy of dissemination, creating awareness and building capacities at all levels of public administration,” he said.
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