Monthly Archives: March, 2007
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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