A few days ago, we learned that Major General Shahzada Alam Malik (Retd.) had stepped down from the leadership of the Pakistan Telecom Authority. We believe that his seven-year tenure at the helm of the PTA merits an assessment. It begins thus:
Pakistan’s recent telecom developments constitute a South Asian success story. From two million in 2002, the number of active mobile SIMs increased to 79 million by end 2007. This is a compound annual growth rate of 115 per cent a year, one of the highest in the world, and the highest in South Asia for that period.
The full document is Pakistan’s telecom transformation, 2002-07
We fully realize that readers, especially from Pakistan, may have varying views on whether or not Pakistan’s telecom sector was transformed,…
This extraordinary book explains the engine that has catapulted the Internet from backwater to ubiquity—and reveals that it is sputtering precisely because of its runaway success. With the unwitting help of its users, the generative Internet is on a path to a lockdown, ending its cycle of innovation—and facilitating unsettling new kinds of control.
IPods, iPhones, Xboxes, and TiVos represent the first wave of Internet-centered products that can’t be easily modified by anyone except their vendors or selected partners. These “tethered appliances” have already been used in remarkable but little-known ways: car GPS systems have been reconfigured at the demand of law enforcement to eavesdrop on the occupants at all times, and digital video recorders have been ordered to self-destruct thanks to a lawsuit against the manufacturer…
Globally, 2.1 billion wireless broadband customers will generate US$784 billion in service revenue by 2015, said a latest report of UK’s consulting outfit Analysys Mason. HSPA will support 88% of all wireless broadband consumers at the end of 2008, and its importance will continue. “Despite the increasing availability of LTE and WiMAX, HSPA and HSPA+ will still support 54% of wireless broadband users by the end of 2015,” said the report’s co-author Dr Mark Heath.
WiMAX will fail to achieve a significant share of the rapidly developing wireless broadband market, contributing only 2% of global revenue. “The vast majority of MNOs will not break ranks to WiMAX, but will upgrade to LTE, resulting in over four times more LTE users by the end of 2015.” Read more.
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Sri Lanka has been enmeshed in conflict for the past 30 years, with just a brief respite during the ceasefire of 2002-05. The LIRNEasia study that is referred to in this post, was conducted in the government controlled areas of the Jaffna district just before the ceasefire ended, de facto. The war still goes on; the phone lines keep being switched off; people are being asked to carry receipts for their SIMs in addition to identity papers. Perhaps this discussion can be taken forward with some good outcomes?
ICT infrastructure in conflict zones | L I R N E . N E T
“One is that the lure of high demand and profits may be sufficient to pull investors through the obstacles posed by bad governance (though…
Very US-centric and so pre-knowledge economy, but the main argument is still valid. We need to free up spectrum in a major way. There no need to take cues from the FCC. The reforms can start right here in Asia.
Op-Ed Contributor - Why Bandwidth Is the Oil of the Information Economy - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com
The solution is to relax the overregulation of the airwaves and allow use of the wasted spaces. Anyone, so long as he or she complies with a few basic rules to avoid interference, could try to build a better Wi-Fi and become a broadband billionaire. These wireless entrepreneurs could one day liberate us from wires, cables and rising prices.
Such technologies would not work perfectly right away, but over time clever entrepreneurs…
Risk and the perception of risk are fascinating issues, especially because perception and reality do not always mesh. Here are some links for those who ask about mobile phones causing brain cancer.
Findings - 10 Things to Scratch From Your Worry List - NYTimes.com
4. Carcinogenic cellphones. Some prominent brain surgeons made news on Larry King’s show this year with their fears of cellphones, thereby establishing once and for all that epidemiology is not brain surgery — it’s more complicated.
As my colleague Tara Parker-Pope has noted, there is no known biological mechanism for the phones’ non-ionizing radiation to cause cancer, and epidemiological studies have failed to find consistent links between cancer and cellphones.
It’s always possible today’s worried doctors will be vindicated, but I’d bet they’ll be remembered…
To an ordinary observer the image on left looks like some monkeys but to Nuwan Waidyanatha that is his complex Early Warning System. Monkeys act as sensors and detectors of hazards (aka a leopard) to deer – who would take immediate action for mass evacuation.
Again the image on top right look likes a damper to any engineering student, but to Nuwan that is mass evacuation. The figure below might explain it better with the blue line representing a quick but rough evacuation and the red line a smoother one.
What does this figure has to do with Broadband QoS? If the zero line is assumed to be the accepted level, this explains the change in QoS with the growth of markets. Initially it is the best with…
Nuwan noted that this leads on from the earlier coversation that were had in regard to Early Warning Systems (EWS) and explained why classification is importat for people in this field. This is important mainly for comparisons between countries, institutions and technologies. And so a ranking should be established.
Four examples were identified,
- Community based last mile hazard warning system
- Traceability of agriculture markets- trying to maximize the profit of the produce.
- Dam failure EWS
- Financial EWS- Looks at currency and banking crisis within a country.
Looking at early warning systems in a abstract way.
There are some ambiguous schemes that have been used..
- According to a space of time
- Multiplicity of events
- Decision model
- Domain: financial, flood, tsunami, cyclone etc
Therefore it can be noted that ICTs are used to try and minimize or distance the…
Nuwan Waidyanatha will conduct a colloquium on the topic of ‘My spring break in Kunming: Classification of Early Warning Systems on the 29th of July 2008.
The Colloquium will focus on the question that came up during one of the LIRNEasia brain storming sessions which was “what can and what can’t the Last-Mile Hazard Warning System do?”; i.e. what are its capabilities and capacities? The answer was “lets classify the LM-HWS”
“During the 3 months I had between submitting the ‘biosurveillance’ proposal and being awarded the research grant, I spent time taking a stab at the open problem of /classifying early warning systems/. The theoretical framework looks at applying system theory, complexity theory, and queuing theory as a basis to derive the classifiers. The belief is…
“Without question, the book addresses an important and timely issue. The organization of the book around the four pillars of the business environment, the information infrastructure, the innovation system and human resources, is praiseworthy. The book must be commended for bringing up the topic of what should (and should not) be done, as the Sri Lankan economy moves from reliance on agriculture to reliance on services and valued-added agriculture and industry. It contributes to and adds credence to an ongoing discussion on this subject in Sinhala and English in the popular media”
This is the first paragraph of the review Rohan Samarajiva did on ‘Building the Sri Lankan knowledge economy’. The publication was launched sometime back.
Read the full review here.
Here are the presentations done by Rohan Samarajiva and…
The LIRNEasia book has been reviewed in Current Science by Ashok Jhunjhunwala. Below is the last para.
The success and failure of policies and regulations need to be studied under such a backdrop. Each nation would have its specificities, and comparisons between nations may often be difficult. It is this
difficult task that the book takes up. It has done a great job in reminding us that the telecom demand is stronger than what most envisage. It points to the constraints posed by policies and regulations,
especially in reaching the BoP. It gives enough examples of what would indeed be possible only if one gets the policies right. It is a great book for those who influence policy and regulation. It is an interesting reading for those who are…
The op-ed piece written up on the basis of one of the LIRNEasia benchmark studies, has been published in the leading Bangladesh newspaper, Daily Star. The data and recommendations thus have been published, in various forms, in the special issue of Himal Southasian, in The Dawn, as a Choices column on LBO, and also flashed by AFP. As a result of the latter, it has got play in a number of publications, including in a Vietnam publication, the Mirror online (Sri Lanka), etc.
Telecompk.net has also started a discussion.
Indian papers were unfortunately too preoccupied with the Parliamentary drama around the confidence motion. And then Ahmedabad happened. But we keep hoping. Bhutan and Maldives may come in too.
The test of course is whether intra-SAARC prices come down. It…
China has the largest number of mobile users as a country. It now also has the largest number of Internet users.
China Surpasses U.S. in Number of Internet Users - NYTimes.com
China said the number of Internet users in the country reached about 253 million last month, putting it ahead of the United States as the world’s biggest Internet market.
The majority of the country’s Internet users are 30 or younger.
The estimate, based on a national phone survey and released on Thursday by the China Internet Network Information Center in Beijing, showed a powerful surge in Internet adoption in this country over the last few years, particularly among teenagers.
The number of Internet users jumped more than 50 percent, or by about 90 million people, during the last year,…
This is from Lankadeepa online. It quotes Prime Minster Ratnasiri Wickramanayake saying one reason of restricting CMDA phones to be used only in one address (registered one) is to prevent the loss of government revenue from international traffic. He was responding to a query by Chief Opposition Whip Joseph Michael Perera MP at the parliament.
Sri Lanka uses CDMA technology for fixed connections but with signals available anywhere within local loop, or if not been blocked by the operator even outside, it can be converted to a ‘mobile’. Given the distinct sharing behaviour we have seen at BOP, many may use their CDMAs in multiple locations. (eg. Guides at Udawalave park use them as car phones). New laws can bring the usage down, unless present non-owner users purchase…
Dr Muhammed Yaseen, who served as a Member of the Authority since 2006, has been appointed to succeed Major General R Shahzada Alam Malik (retd.) at the helm of the PTA. LIRNEasia has been an admirer of the massive improvements the Pakistan telecom sector achieved since Chairman Malik’s appointment in 1 March 2002. We wish him well in his future endeavors and thank him for his dynamic service to the sector.
We warmly welcome Dr Yaseen. Recalling the stimulating exchanges we had in Islamabad when we presented our research, we assure him of continued support and collaboration as the PTA strives to build on the existing strong foundation.
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