Bird-band has outpaced Broadband when a South African technology outfit named Unlimited IT has proved it was faster for them to transmit data with a carrier pigeon than to send it using Telkom , the country’s leading internet service provider, BBC reports. The 11-month-old pigeon, Winston, took one hour and eight minutes to fly the 80 km (50 miles) from Unlimited IT’s offices near Pietermaritzburg to the coastal city of Durban with a data card was strapped to his leg. Whereas, including downloading, the transfer took two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds — the time it took for only four percent of the data to be transferred using Telkom’s ADSL. Unlimited IT performed the stunt after becoming frustrated with slow internet transmission times. The company has 11 call-centers around the country and regularly sends data to its other branches.
The engineers are skeptic about mobile broadband because they think it’s hard to manage an all-IP network. The voice-centric good old TDM networks are lot easier to handle. The investors lack interest in mobile broadband because 3G licenses are quite expensive. They prefer to continue the legacy of GSM as the ROI is pretty good. Most of the governments are obsessed with auctioning the 3G licenses because of the guaranteed windfall.
Levels of trust between utility regulators and operators around the world are improving, claims a survey, though the report also warns that trust remains a fragile commodity which can easily be broken. The report, produced by KPMG and EIU, examines the level of trust between regulators and operators across five utility sectors – telecoms, power, water, transport and post. Few key findings of this survey include: 75 percent of regulators see themselves as strong performers regarding the consistency of their decisions and rulings. Only 30 percent of operators share that view. A net 32 percent of regulators feel that trust between the two parties has improved in the past year whereas a net 18 percent of operators share that view.
Farouk Abdul Aziz Al-Kasim, a migrant Iraqi geologist, and his Norwegian counterpart drafted Norway’s petroleum regulation during a fishing trip in 1970. Norway’s parliament wasted no time and unanimously approved it to govern the hydrocarbon sector. This created the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate, the oil industry regulator, and Statoil, the national oil company (now known as StatoilHydro). The Norwegian regulatory model retained the private sector’s competitive drive and its expertise. It also ensured enough regulatory independence to rein in the state oil company as well as its private-sector peers.
We wrote a few weeks back that fixed-mobile substitution that was decreasing fixed subscriptions in India and Pakistan had arrived in Sri Lanka. Instead of waiting for more fixed phones to be disconnected, Sri Lanka Telecom is taking proactive steps to keep its customers. Shows that competition delivers what court cases and regulation cannot. Sri Lanka Telecom, the island’s dominant fixed line operator, said it was offering lower rates and discounts in new subscriber packages amid intensifying competition among phone companies. In its new post-paid tariff plans called ‘V talk’, call rates to fixed and mobile phones have been reduced up to 35 percent and monthly rental reduced up to 48 percent, the company said in a statement.
Broadband user testing is nothing new. Tools to measure the speed of a link were available even in pre-net days. Later, they became more user-friendly, more sophisticated and better looking. Today you can pick one from a gamut of tools to instantly find out the speed of your link. Then why AT-Tester?
Full participation in the global Internet Economy requires electronic connectivity of considerable complexity. Today, due to a worldwide wave of liberalization and technological and business innovations in the mobile space, much of the world is electronically connected, albeit not at the levels that would fully support participation in the global Internet Economy. Yet, many millions of poor people are engaging in tasks normally associated with the Internet such as information retrieval, payments and remote computing using relatively simple mobiles. Understanding the business model that enabled impressive gains in voice connectivity as well as the beginnings of more-than-voice applications over mobiles is important not only because widespread broadband access among the poor is likely to be achieved by extending this model but because it would be the basis of coherent and efficacious policy and regulatory responses… This is an excerpt from a background report by Rohan Samarajiva, to be presented at “Policy coherence in the application of information and communication technologies for development,” a joint workshop organized by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Information for Development Program (infoDev) / World Bank from 10-11 September 2009 in Paris. The report has been published in the OECD’s Development […]
Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) once the political ally to ruling Peoples’ Alliance of Sri Lanka, has come up with an innovative idea to link 300,000 plus Internally Displaced Persons with their relatives. Why not create Face Book accounts? Daily Mirror story does not say so, but perhaps JVP wants it done by the government. Rohan Samarajiva made a less complex and more effective suggestion: Why not give them mobile phones? ‘The technology that allows freedom to talk even without the freedom to walk is the phone.