Monthly Archives: March, 2007
Applications now open for LIRNEasia Young Scholar Tutorials, hosted by NUS, Singapore. Click here for info on how to apply.
Dial for freedom with Amnesty Wireless
Dhaka, March 23 (bdnews24.com) — Grameen Bank’s Muhammad Yunus stunned the world by unveiling a poverty alleviation initiative using mobile phone on March 26, 1997.
He buys bulk minutes from Grameenphone’s GSM mobile network and resells among the microcredit borrowers in Bangladesh.
The industry now recognises such business model as Mobile Virtual Network Operator or MVNO. Yunus and Grameen shared the Nobel Peace Price in 2006.
Ten years later on March 21, 2007, another Nobel Peace laureate, the Amnesty International’s USA chapter, unveiled similar high-tech philanthropic initiative called “Amnesty Wireless”.
This MVNO is a joint venture between Amnesty International and Working Asset. It buys bulk airtime from the Sprint CDMA network and resells mobile phone services among Amnesty Wireless customers at competitive rates.
Colloquium on Refining TRE Methodology
Based on feedback received from participants at CPRsouth in Manila and the WDR Expert Forum in Singapore on the Telecom Regulatory Environment (TRE) assessment conducted in six countries in South and South-East Asia in 2006 (India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand) we have decided to refine the methodology.
Dimuthu Ratnadiwakara and Shamistra Soysa, new additions to LIRNEasia’s team in Colombo present the preliminary results from the adjusted methodology.
India – GSM daily adds almost 150k in February as CDMA falters
CDMA net additions in India dropped to their lowest level for nine months in February 2007, as Reliance Infocomm took its foot off the gas after four successive months of net additions over 1 million. In total a net 1.14 million new CDMA customers were added to the national customer base in India in February, which equates to just 23% of the GSM total of 4.88 million for the month. Given that February has only 28 days, however, the totals are not strictly comparable with other months of the year. Read more.
Media coverage of Teleuse@BOP Project
LIRNEasia conducted a media workshop to present findings from the Teleuse@BOP project in Singapore on Feb 28, 2007. Teleuse@BOP (Shoestrings 2) is a large sample study undertaken by LIRNEasia on how low-income groups benefit from telecom and how the access pattern differs in five Asian countries, namely India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Philippines and Thailand. The research looks at the use and ownership of telephones, what kinds of phones people use and why, the perceived benefits, expenditure on telephones and the barriers to telecom use in the five countries.
The study, Teleuse@BOP, is the second study of this nature that LIRNEasia has conducted. It has brought out several interesting findings, which would provide valuable insights into the telecom user space in these Asian countries.
Media coverage of the Teleuse@BOP findings are below:
Telecom Journal from Thailand
Teleuse at the Bottom of the Pyramid presented to 15th Convergence event in New Delhi
At the invitation of the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), LIRNEasia’s teleuse@BOP research of relevance to the question of increasing services provided to users in rural areas was presented at a session chaired by Mr Shantanu Consul, Administrator of India’s USO Fund. In response to audience questions Executive Director Samarajiva stated that the higher-than-other-countries percentage of non-owner teleusers at the Bottom of the Pyramid in India showed that there was a real problem these people faced in getting connected. They could afford USD 5 per month for the services (and in some cases paid even more), but the difficulty was with the cost of getting connected (and coverage, of course).
The presentation can be downloaded here.
Is Thailand sleepwalking backwards?
Thailand’s Information and Communications Technology minister says he wants to fully restore the state-enterprise status of TOT and CAT Telecom to allow better use of their assets to serve the public.”These two companies can become the country’s backbone. Unfortunately, they were turned into private companies. I’ll try to bring their state-enterprise status back,” ICT minister Sitthichai Pookaiyaudom said at a forum. Read more.
Malaysia awards four WiMax licenses to new entrants
Malaysian regulator has ignored the claims of incumbent fixed and mobile operators and instead has elected to award four WiMax franchises to players new to the market. The decision to exclude existing operators was a setback for Digi. The company also failed to gain 3G spectrum and is now a saddled with an EDGE network that it will have to promote against potential HSDPA and WiMax alternatives. Read more.
Mobile roaming, or the art of gouging someone else’s customer
In the old days, telecom operators gouged each other’s customers through excessive termination charges (settlements) for international calls. That went the way of the dodo with bypass and calling cards. Then they came up with the idea of gouging the customers of other operators foolish enough to use roaming facilities. Now the EU is trying to tamp it down, at least for its own citizens:
“The price of using a mobile phone in another EU country could be capped at 50 cents ($0.66; 34p) a minute. EU telecoms ministers agreed in principle to the limit at an informal meeting on the sidelines of the CeBIT hi-tech fair in Hanover. The European Parliament will debate the issue in May and ministers are understood to want the new law to come into effect at the beginning of July.” more
Will this lead to even more vicious gouging of non-EU citizens? A good case for benchmark regulation and transparency, one thinks.
Following successful course, LIRNEasia plans regular offerings; next course in March 2008 in Singapore
Report on the 11th LIRNE.NET Executive Training Course on Regulation, 25 February – 3 March 2007, conducted by LIRNEasia and CONNECTasia Forum Pte.Ltd.
Rohan Samarajiva, Course Director
The 11th LIRNE.NET course on “Telecom Reform: Strategies to achieve connectivity and convergence,” was held February 25th – March 3rd, 2007 at the Changi Village Hotel, Singapore. It was attended by 33 persons from 13 countries, ranging from Mongolia to Congo and South Africa to Bhutan.
Among the participants were 13 persons from regulatory agencies, including three members of regulatory collegiums. Eleven persons from the management of telecom operators, and nine from research organizations, universities and civil society made up the balance. Twenty were men; and 13 women.
The course had two components: a conventional lecture and assignment based module of five days and one and a half days of research presentations. In all, the participants had the benefit of listening to 28 speakers from research organizations, universities, regulatory agencies, operators, and international organizations (both ITU and World Bank) over an eight-day period. One speaker, Professor Bill Melody, who was unable to attend due to medical reasons, spoke on two occasions via Skype.
The course included a team assignment involving ..read more
LIRNEasia-Sarvodaya disaster warning forum
LIRNEasia in partnership with Sarvodaya, is organizing the concluding events of “Evaluating Last-Mile Hazard Information Dissemination Research Project” in Moratuwa, Sri Lanka on 28-29 March 2007. This “Last-Mile” project reflects Sarvodaya and LIRNEasia’s shared objective of evaluating the suitability of information communication technology (ICT) in the last mile of a national disaster warning system for Sri Lanka and possible extension to other developing countries. A major part of the concluding events is the forum entitled, “Sharing knowledge on disaster warning, with a focus on community-based last-mile warning systems”, which will be held on 28-29 March 2007 at the Sarvodaya Damsak Mandiraya (Sarvodaya Main Campus) in Moratuwa. The conference intends to bring together knowledge from the South Asia Region to Sarvodaya for a forum on practical solutions for communicating risk information to rural communities. The events also include a Media Conference on 30 March 2007.
LIRNEasia researcher appointed Secretary to Minister of Finance Thailand
Our colleague who was a member of the six-country research study, Deunden Nikomborirak, has been appointed secretary to the new Minister of Finance in the interim Thai government. The news coverage of the appointment of the new Minister also mentions Deunden as one of his other pro-market colleagues. The new Minister, for example, had criticized the government’s December 2006 actions that led to capital flight.
We wish her the very best in her new responsibilities. Knowing her abilities and intellect, we are confident that Thailand will be well served, even if the research community loses in the short term.
Can HSDPA leapfrog infrastructure bottlenecks to bring Indonesia online?
Most Indonesians access the Internet primarily using fixed wireline infrastructure, mostly dialup. Because of lack of competition in the fixed line sector due to various reasons fixed line growth has been stagnant which has also affected Internet growth in the country. Not only are no new lines being added to bring more homes online, the inadequate backbone infrastructure in large swathe of the country makes deployment of broadband services unviable even if incumbent’s local loop bottleneck could be bypassed.
However, yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (March 15, 2007) seems to suggest that high speed 3G wireless technology like HSDPA can bring broadband on a large scale to Indonesians. It (misleadingly) implies that since HSDPA is merely a software upgrade to 3G networks it will not require any new major telecom infrastructure investment in Indonesia. The fact is that 3G services have just been launched in the last quarter of 2006 in some urban areas concentrated in and around Jakarta. The Indonesian operators have a long way to go to upgrade all their base stations to support 3G. Even if the base stations were upgraded to 3G standards there are no shortcuts to building backbone infrastructure (preferably fiber optic) to connect the ..read more
Regulatory burden to be reduced on new international operator in Indonesia
The Indonesian government imposed unreasonable burdens on the new entrant for international service in a recently issued White Paper 140. LIRNEasia highlighted the unfairness of burdening new entrants with obligations that the two existing incumbents (Telkom & Indosat) were not subjected too in comments it submitted to DGPOSTEL (one of the two regulatory bodies): 4.4 The Indonesian policymakers may have misunderstood the concept of asymmetric regulation. Asymmetric rules place additional burdens on dominant group of providers that other operators are not subjected to. In the current White Paper, many additional burdens are imposed on the new entrant that are not imposed on the two incumbents, PT Telkom & PT Indosat. Requirements for building FO from Indonesia to TIER-1 IP backbone, building domestic FO to Internet Exchange, building 10 Indonesian Central Gateway etc should be applied to all international gateway operators or to none at all.
On March 16, the Director General of DGPOSTEL conceded that requiring new international operator to build 10 new gateways was a heavy burden on the new entrant especially when the two existing operators in total had six.
The tender for the telephone fixed line is postponed till June March 16, 2007(Translated from Bisnis Indonesia, March 16, 2007) Jakarta:[...] The ..read more
CFA Sri Lanka Seminar: Emerging Trends in Telecom
Rohan Samarajiva’s presentation slides presented at a CFA seminar on ’Emerging Trends in Telecom’ in August 2006 are now available here.
Good practice in telecom reform
Friend of LIRNEasia, Sherille Ismail (Senior Counsel, Office of Strategic Planning and Policy Analysis of the FCC) has written an excellent review of theWorld Bank’s “Information and Communications for Development 2006: Global Trends and Policies,” concluding with: “The telecommunications sector has performed in a spectacular fashion over the past two decades, bringing modern technologies at affordable prices to consumers throughout the world. The future holds the promise of even greater gains, as ICT ripples through economies, increasing productivity and generating efficiencies. To achieve the desired results, governments, scholars, investors, and the international community must successfully negotiate many challenges. Not the least of these is the particular challenge of dealing with issues in developing countries, where “there are often fundamental differences between what is proposed by technological visionaries, many of whom have never seen a village, and what is actually needed by end users, many of whom have never used a telephone.” This book is filled with reliable data, thoughtful analysis, and time-tested policy prescriptions. It is an essential roadmap for anyone seeking to accept this challenge.”
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