Monthly Archives: July, 2009
CPRafrica 2012/CPRsouth7: call for abstracts and young scholar applications. Click here for details.
3R work in the news
An article in the Sunday Times, Sri Lanka features the 3R (reduce-reuse-recycle) work done by the Girl Guides Association of Sri Lanka, administratively/logistically supported by LIRNEasia and funded by IDRC. More information on LIRNEasia’s 3R project is available here. In recent years they have designed projects such as 3R which stands for the three-fold environmental [...]
Cell Broadcasting for Early Disaster Warning in Maldives: Report released today
Maldives, a country of 1,192 islands and 290,000 citizens, is highly dependent on its natural resources. Along with tourism, which provides more than 30 percent of the country’s income, fisheries and agriculture are essential to livelihoods on the country’s 199 inhabited islands. The December 2004 tsunami affected many of its islands and wrought considerable devastation [...]
Perils of deregulating payphone tariffs
LIRNEasia is on record supporting tariff forbearance, another word for deregulation. But that does not mean that we support it in all circumstances. The key is that consumers have a choice of suppliers. For that to happen, there must be multiple suppliers. In places such as airports the owner of the building/space usually concessions out [...]
India’s broadband: What to be and not to be
Two years back India’s then finance minister Mr. Palaniappan Chidambaram said, “Regulation must stay one step ahead of innovation”. He also asked the developed countries to stop lecturing the emerging economies about what is right and what is wrong. New Delhi now seems to be a fanatic fan of the developed world’s worst wrongdoing in telecoms regulation. [...]
LIRNEasia research brought to bear on mobile number portability question
Pakistan did it, with supposed good results. The Maldives studied it and decided it was not worth it. Sri Lanka is supposed to be thinking about it. It is mobile number portability (MNP). None of them had the benefit of the teleuse@BOP results. Back in October 2008, 25 percent of mobile owners at the Pakistan [...]
Colloquium: Business Models for Delivering Mobile Value-Added Services
This colloquium was conducted by Puree Sirasoonthorn. The objective of this paper is to examine the business model that BuzzCity operationalizes in Thailand. BuzzCity is a developer of global wireless communities and consumer services. Established in 1999 in Singapore, BuzzCity today operates the world’s leading wireless community - for two distinct audiences: the newly connected emerging [...]
Teleuse@BOP qualitative results showcased in Times of India
As the media dissemination phase of the teleuse@BOP 3 study draws to a close, we were pleased to see the qualitative results showcased in a long article in the Times of India, perhaps one of the most prestigious among the high-quality media of India. Rural and low-income consumer segments are attracting immense interest as they [...]
First instalment of LIRNEasia’s contribution to Lanka Central Bank’s policy making on mobile money
One of the greatest contributions that can be made to help people pull themselves out of poverty is to facilitate safe, secure, low-cost transactions. Mobile payments which are potentially accessible to almost the entire populations of emerging economies need to be encouraged in this regard. At the beginning of the year, the Central Bank of [...]
Banded forbearance article published in International Journal of Regulation & Governance
Banded forbearance, a concept we have been working on since early 2007 which was further developed in our interactions with the Communications Authority of the Maldives, has just been published as a refereed journal article by the International Journal of Regulation and Governance. A previous version of this article was selected for presentation at the [...]
Sri Lanka: Our toes are free and we have a mobile web portal
We would have shown no interest if a Colombo school did this, but when Navodhya School, Pitakumbura, Bibile (300 km off from Colombo, in the border of a post conflict area) launches a mobile web portal we take note. (Kottu.org readers might remember some blogs from this far off place.) www.m.technovillage.org looks more a prototype, [...]
Colloquium: An evaluation of different models for the issuance of licenses for service provision and frequencies
The presentation was done by Payal Malik. The presentation began by Payal explaining that there is a certain level of abstraction in the topic. It is excepted by most that deleivering telecom connectivity and services helps development. The challenge now lies in go beyond voice and to see how the BOP can benefit from connectivity. [...]
Namibian interconnection rates converged at NAD 0.60 (USD 0.07)
Namibian Communications Commission (NCC) has ordered the convergence of interconnection rates between operators (Cell One, Telecom Namibia and MTC) through the introduction of a standard charges structure; rates will be reduced bi-annually over a two-year period. Symmetry between mobile and fixed termination rates supports fixed-mobile convergence and removes distortions caused by previously higher mobile-to-mobile rates. A benchmarking [...]
World Bank gives USD 1.9m to Indonesia for Internet access
The government of Indonesia has announced that World Bank, as administrator for Global Partnership on Output-Based Aid (GPOBA) , in April 2009 has signed a grant agreement for US$1.9 million with the Republic of Indonesia to facilitate access to Internet and associated telecommunication services for people living in remote areas in Java dan Sumatra. Access [...]
Phones for more than voice
An interesting article on MIT’s website discusses how several business ventured started by its students spawned by class projects or independent work are exploring news ways of using the mobile phones for improving the day-to-day lives of people, particularly in the developing world. Applications range from mobile health-care services to agricultural and mobile payment services [...]
Teleuse at the BOP and citation practices
Reading an article by Araba Sey on a small-sample study of teleuse among non-owners in Ghana in a special issue of info, edited by two colleagues in LIRNE.NET, I was surprised to see no references whatsoever to our work. We who are at edge of the global academic system had excuses, but really, after Scholar.Google, [...]
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