A new mobile package has been launched in the United Arab Emirates which has been designed for the country’s large expat manual labourers. The new package, called ‘alo’, which means ‘hello’ in Arabic, was launched on Monday by the Permanent Committee of Labour Affairs in Dubai and mobile network, du. The alo brand is designed keeping in mind the needs of the expat labour workforce primarily from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Egypt, China who work for the construction companies and live in labour camps, a statement from du said. In order to communicate with them in their own language, ‘alo’ comes with a multilingual user guide in the SIM pack. Read more.
Dialog Mobile has proven that broadband has a massive potential in under-penetrated markets. HSPA has all of the necessary qualities – the ability to utilise existing infrastructure, low cost devices, high throughput – making broadband commercially viable even among the poorest people. But it’s not simply a matter of technology deployment, as Dialog has discovered. Charging models and the service wrap are important however operators have to create the demand by supporting entrepreneurs and content developers to ensure that people that have not used computers before want to return time and again. Get it right, and profits can be made even among the smallest markets.
“We must realize the fact that disasters threaten sustained economic growth of the society and the country.” These were the words of Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani addressing the opening ceremony of the first National Disaster Risk Management Conference. The function, reported Associated Press of Pakistan, was organized to mark the Disaster Awareness Day observed annually after the catastrophic earthquake which struck country’s northern areas in October 2005, killing 73,000 people and leaving 3.5 million homeless. On the other side of the border Congress President Sonia Gandhi has said there is a need of effective disaster management to mitigate the woes of the people in future calamities, with floods affecting several districts of Bihar and other parts of the country.
At the end of a long day at Telecoms World South Asia in Dhaka, I presented some of the preliminary results of the Broadband QoSE work being done with IIT Madras. I talked about the finding that the bottleneck in Chennai and Colombo appeared to be the international segment and that the first results from the testing done in Dhaka suggested the same applied to Bangladesh, with the ISPs using satellite (versus undersea cable) were suffering very high latencies. The CEO of a Pakistan ISP, Mr Wahaj us Siraj, said that the situation in Pakistan was very different, with plenty of capacity available on the undersea cables and low contention ratios (1:4) being used. Prices of international capacity had come down radically in recent times, he said, and now amount to only around 25 per cent of costs. I responded that we need to start testing in Pakistan soon, because this further illustrates the value of the AshokaTissa methodology, which allows the diagnosis of where problems exist which may vary from location to location.
An article entitled, ‘Teleuse at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Beyond Universal Access’, co-authored by Harsha de Silva and Ayesha Zainudeen, has been published in Telektronikk, a leading telecommunications journal, published by Telenor, Norway. Appearing in the journal’s second issue for 2008, aptly titled, ‘Emerging Markets in Telecommunications’, the article explores the extent to which “universal access” to telecommunications has been achieved in Asia, based on findings from LIRNEasia’s five-country study of the use of telecommunication services at the ‘Bottom of the Pyramid’, namely in India, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Very high levels of access, but low levels of ownership are found. The paper then looks at the potential benefits that these non-owner users are missing out on, and then goes on to look at the key barriers to ownership that are faced by them. The paper estimates that there could be close to 150 million new subscribers at the BOP in these five countries by mid-2008.
International roaming charges may be reduced by up to half throughout the Asian region if a proposal from Malaysia’s Communications Minister, Datuk Shaziman Abu Mansor is accepted by his ASEAN counterparts. “We plan to reduce the roaming charges with Singapore first. In fact, I told the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) two weeks ago to proceed with this,” he told a local newspaper. He added that the move would particularly benefit the many thousands of Malaysians who commute across the border to work in Singapore each day. The regulators in both countries are currently working on a plan to lower the roaming rates across the border.
Bangladesh government has rewarded the telecoms regulator with Tk.10 crore (Tk.100 million or $1.46 million) bonus, according to a press report. This windfall is the result of penalizing four mobile phone operators $121.
In a fullpage advertisement that will be published in the Sunday papers on October 5th, Tigo, Sri Lanka’s “third” mobile operator (not that we place that much stock in market share calculations based on numbers of active SIMs), will effectively end the unloved receiving-party-pays regime in Sri Lanka. Its tariff scheme is about the simplest I have seen in a long time: all incoming calls free; offnet outgoing 10 LKR cents a second (roughly USD 0.001); onnet outgoing 5 LKR cents a second (roughly USD 0.0005). No time periods.
Telecompk.net is carrying a multi-part interview with one of the recent and more active universal service funds in the region. Part 1 is here.
Mark Wood, who among other things coordinates the group that is working harmonizing the address space for cell broadcasts on mobiles at ITU-T, had an intensive discussion with representatives of Sri Lanka mobile operators at a meeting organized at very short notice by LIRNEasia on 2nd of October 2008. He was on his way back from a successful visit to Male to speak at a cell broadcasting workshop co-organized by LIRNEasia and the Telecom Authority of Maldives. Why is harmonization important? Coastal areas are vulnerable to rapid-onset, broad-spectrum hazards such as tsunamis and cyclones. Coastal areas also attract large numbers of tourists.
Joseph Wilson, PhD presented the findings of the TRE study in Pakistan Started with the industry outlook. The mobile sector, Mobilink licence was renewed last year from providing the service. The licence cost UDS 291 mn. The cost is the same for everyone. Paktel purchased by China mobile for USD 400 mn.
Large corporations engage in acts of Corporate Social Responsibility. Non-profit organizations like ours sometimes engage in acts of Social Corporate Responsibility. SCR differs from CSR because the beneficiary here is a corporation. We recognize that large corporations can affect the course of events in countries and in some cases, the world. Therefore, when a large corporation with massive resources asked us to help educate their senior managers (especially those in charge of CSR) about key issues in telecom, we agreed.
In December 2005 Bangladesh became connected to the SEA-ME-WE 4 undersea cable, but it took much longer for the people of Bangladesh to actually use the connectivity, because the incumbent government-owned monopoly BTTB had not been able to connect the country’s networks to the landing station in Cox’s Bazar in time. I was invited to speak on this subject at a meeting in Dhaka at which the then Minister and other senior decision makers were present (they had little alternative, there was a hartal going on outside). These comments were written up as an op ed piece and published in the Daily Star that same month. In it I recommended the following: “Without lessening the urgency of reforming Bangladesh’s regulatory framework, the immediate problem can be addressed by structurally separating the cable segment (the share of the SEA-ME-WE 4 cable, the cable station, the fibre connecting the landing station to major population centers, the redundancy channels and related facilities) from BTTB, vesting its ownership in a fully government owned company. To ensure that the new company is truly separate from BTTB and that it is efficiently managed, it is necessary to concession out its management to a competent international operator […]
Maldives is a country with an estimated population of 309,575 (August 2008), 312,527 active mobile SIMs, two mobile operators, and complete cellular coverage of all inhabited atolls, including most of the internal ferry and shipping routes (only a little bit in the one and a half degree channel in not covered, and plans are afoot to give coverage there too). It was also the worst affected in terms of property loss in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami on a per capita basis. It is also one of the countries most dependent on tourism revenues. Of all the South Asian countries, it is best positioned to exploit the potential of cell broadcasting both for early warning and for commercial applications. In this light, LIRNEasia was pleased to be invited to conduct a scoping study on cell broadcasting for both public-service and commercial purposes by the Telecom Authority of the Maldives.
LIRNEasia’s Chanuka Wattegama will make the main presentation at a live webcast of a workshop on Disaster Risk Management in the Information Age, to be held from 8 – 9 October, 2008, 9 – 12 p.m. (ET), accessible at the following link: http://www.worldbank.org/edevelopment/live Co-organizers of the event include the World Bank’s Global Information Communication and Technology Department, infoDev and the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR).