Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) will auction licenses to operate two interconnection exchanges (ICX) and three International Gateway (IGW) facilities on November 22.
Outbound PSTN and mobile calls will first terminate in the ICX. Then the calls will be processed in the IGW followed by getting routed to overseas via BTTB’s submarine cable station. Similar path will be followed for the inbound overseas calls.
Foreign investments and joint ventures are strictly prohibited. Even the non-resident Bangladeshis are not eligible to invest.
Incumbent private operators (PSTN, mobile and ISP) are not allowed to apply for the IGW and ICX licenses. But the state-owned BTTB gets both the licenses. The newly enacted international lonng distance telecoms policy mandates these conditions.
Prof. William Melody, Arno Wirzenius and Anatul Fateh have detected numerous inconsistencies in this initiative.…
It is high time that Asian spectrum managers started thinking about more efficient use this valuable resource.
In Search of Wireless Wiggle Room - New York Times
Having missed the opportunity to include these provisions in the coming auction, the F.C.C. will have another chance this year to create cheaper wireless broadband services. Google and other technology companies, including Dell, Philips and Microsoft, are part of a group called the White Space Coalition that is asking the F.C.C. to open up the empty space between assigned TV channels to unlicensed users and devices.
The idea would work like this: In many areas, not all broadcast channels are in use. The unused channels are “white spaces” of high-quality spectrum that could be made available to local Internet service providers.…
Tags: cheaper wireless broadband services, Dell, F.C.C., generic devices, Google, Internet service, local Internet service providers, Microsoft, Philips, technology*, White Space Coalition, wireless broadband, Wireless Wiggle Room - New York Times.
Preparing for the Worst | Bangkok Post
Saddam Hossain grew up in Bangladesh listening to stories about storms and cyclones. In school, he learned from textbooks about how to stay safe when a natural disaster strikes. “When there is a warning about a cyclone, we take shelter immediately with our family,” said the 14-year-old student.
In disaster-prone Bangladesh, schools play an important role in educating children about natural calamities and how to keep themselves safe. They also have life-saving equipment that can be distributed to people in the communities.
U.N. Agency Gives Boost to WiMax - New York Times
The United Nations telecommunications agency in Geneva gave the upstart technology called WiMax a vote of approval, providing a sizable victory for Intel and something of a defeat for competing technologies from Qualcomm and Ericsson.
The International Telecommunication Union’s radio assembly agreed late Thursday to include WiMax, a wireless technology that allows Internet and other data connections across much broader areas than Wi-Fi, as part of what is called the third-generation family of mobile standards.
That endorsement opens the way for many of the union’s member countries to devote a part of the public radio spectrum to WiMax, and receivers for it could be built into laptop computers, phones, music players and other portable devices.
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Tags: Ericsson, Geneva, Intel, International Telecommunication Union, portable devices, Qualcomm, telecommunications agency, United Nations, United Nations Agency, upstart technology, WiMax - New York Times, wireless technology.
Mobile phones are about to become the simplest and quickest way to transfer money across borders, under a deal announced yesterday by Western Union and GSM Association, the main mobile phone operators’ body.
The agreement could have a big impact on global cross-border remittances, worth an estimated $500bn a year, and provide a springboard for mobile carriers and Western Union to offer other mobile banking services using “mobile wallet” technology. Cross-border money transfers valued at up to $100 in countries such as India, the Philippines, Mexico and China - which have large volumes of remittances from migrant workers - will be an early priority of the deal.
Thirty-five mobile operators with 800m customers in more than 100 countries have signed up to take part in the GSMA…
Tags: Bharti Airtel, cellular telephone, China, GSM Association, India, Mexico, Mobile banking, Mobile banking services, mobile phones, Sunil Mittal, the Philippines, USD, Western Union.
Sri Lankan government withdrew proposed regressive tax of LKR 50 per month of its new tax proposals on mobile subscribers.
LIRNEasia’s research evidence from the T@BOP study played an important role in pointing out the likely adverse effect of the proposed regressive tax on the mobile users at the “Bottom of the Pyramid”.
The following are the articles/discussions on this topic.
The following is an extract of the The Parliament of Sri Lanka’s Hansard on Mobile Taxation Issue on 6th September 2007.
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Translation: We will be pleased if Hon. Minister removes the regressive tax of LKR 50 as pointed out by Prof. Rohan Samarajiva, Dr. Harsha de…
Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has issued regulation on domestic leased circuits in a bid to provide cheaper bandwidth to IT companies, BPOs and ISPs. The regulation imposes obligation on all service providers who have the capacity of copper, fibre or wireless, and who have been allowed under the licence to provide leased circuits, to share it with other service providers.
For service providers, these regulations open up the possibility of meeting customers’ demand for end-to-end leased circuits, the regulator also said. Tariff ceilings for local leads and ports were also prescribed and the service providers were allowed to offer discounts on a transparent and non-discriminatory basis.
Read more.
The 2007 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Leonid Hurwicz, Eric Maskin, and Roger Myerson “for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory”. But what on earth is “mechanism design theory”?
Adam Smith’s classical metaphor of the invisible hand refers to how the market, under ideal conditions, ensures an efficient allocation of scarce resources. But in practice conditions are usually not ideal; for example, competition is not completely free, consumers are not perfectly informed and privately desirable production and consumption may generate social costs and benefits. Furthermore, many transactions do not take place in open markets but within firms, in bargaining between individuals or interest groups and under a host of other institutional arrangements. How well do different such institutions, or allocation mechanisms, perform?…
Based on Shiller’s writings on the use of insurance as a device to reduce losses from tsunami type events, LIRNEasia has been looking at insurance as a part of the solution. However, the story below suggests that insurance is on the retreat in Shiller’s backyard, in the face of predictions of more violent storms.
In contrast, the following posters, promising “on-the-spot” insurance payments for earthquakes and tsunamis came up on the streets of Colombo, shortly after the September 12th, 2007 false warning:
Home Insurers Canceling in East Over Storm Fears - New York Times
It is 1,200 miles from the coastline where Hurricane Katrina touched land two years ago to the neat colonial-style home here where James Gray, a retired public relations consultant, and his wife, Ann, live.…
Much of LIRNEasia’s work is focused on design of institutions. While we have been drawing on Shiller (not an awardee this time) we will be looking at the work of Hurwicz, Maskin and Myerson in more detail as we move into our third cycle of research.
3 Americans Win Nobel in Economics - New York Times
The work begun by Mr. Hurwicz, and advanced by Mr. Maskin and Mr. Myerson, gave economists and policy makers new intellectual tools to address questions like those listed in the academy’s citation: “How well do different such institutions, or allocation mechanisms, perform? What is the optimal mechanism to reach a certain goal, such as social welfare or private profit? Is government regulation called for, and if so, how is it best…
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Six water pressure sensors placed on the seabed in the southern Bay of Bengal and northern Arabian Sea will act as sentinels in India’s tsunami early warning system, which was formally inaugurated today.
The sensors — four in the Bay and two in the Arabian Sea — will look for changes in ocean water level and send readings via satellite to the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS) in Hyderabad, the hub for the system.
The Rs 125-crore early warning system will also use a network of seismic stations, tide gauges and computer simulations based on seabed studies to issue alerts about tsunamis — waves sometimes triggered by undersea earthquakes.
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Continue reading “Tsunami sentinels on duty under sea - Six sensors in place, six more to…
THE distribution of computing skills across Europe shows a clear pattern according to a recent report from the European Union. The inhabitants of southern and eastern Europe are the least adept at using computers and the internet. Computer whizzes are more likely to be found in a wedge running from Germany up to the Nordic countries. Bulgarians seem a little baffled by the online revolution. But IT skills correlate closely with long-standing access to computers, broadband penetration and the like. As these improve, countries that now lag may encourage a new wave of nerds to emerge. The index was compiled looking both at users’ abilities and at their use of the internet to interact with government and business.
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The Daily Mirror, a leading English daily in Sri Lanka, recently featured an article on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and its potential to drive productivity at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP). The article cited research conducted by LIRNEasia on telecom users at the BOP and the pioneering Grameen microfinance approach to extending telecom access to the poor.
The notion that users at the bottom of the pyramid are either unwilling or unable to access telecommunication facilities is effectively dismissed by the findings of the LIRNEasia cross-country research, which indicates that low income users in Sri Lanka averaged about 23 calls per month, while those in India and Pakistan averaged more than 30 and those in the Philippines averaged around 16…A particularly interesting conclusion that emerges from this…
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