According to the ITU ICTeye, which is now carrying 2008 data, Pakistan’s surge to overtake Sri Lanka has petered out, leaving the Maldives (143 active SIMs/100 people) as the undisputed leader in mobile connectivity (apparently all adult Maldivians carry two active SIMs; there are only two operators in the Maldives), and Sri Lanka second with 52 SIMs per 100 people. On the fixed side, assisted by CDMA phones that are counted as fixed, Sri Lanka is the leader (17 connection per 100 people), followed by Maldives (15 per 100). Like in cricket, the middle of the rankings are the most interesting. Both Pakistan (50/100) and Bhutan (37/100) are ahead of India (29/100) in mobile. This shows that India cannot afford to let up the pace of 10 million connections a month for some time.
From: http://www.bangkokpost.com/business/telecom/26138/ict-promote-3g-services The Information and Communication Technology minister has advised TOT to begin promoting its third-generation mobile phone services to win customers before the 3G auction is called by the National Telecommunications Commission. The minister, Ranongruk Suwunchwee, said TOT must market its 3G service on the 1.9 GHz spectrum to attract people to the services, which are scheduled to be available on a trial basis next month in limited areas of Bangkok.
Rohan Samarajiva, LIRNEasia’s CEO, delivered a keynote address at the recently concluded South Asia Mobile Summit, held in Dhaka, Bangladesh, 21 – 22 October 2009. The two-day event was organized by the South Asia Mobile Forum, a consortium of telecom industry players in the SAARC region, with the aim of creating a platform for market, institutional and technological issues to be discussed and progress made. Rohan made a presentation on South Asia’s Budget Telecom Network Model, that has been adopted by many regional telcos in providing voice services to the bottom of the pyramid (BOP), and how the same can be applied to broadband services as well. The presentation drew on findings from LIRNEasia’s Teleuse@BOP, telecom regulatory environment (TRE) and mobile benchmark studies. The full presentation can be downloaded here.
I have always been interested in why people refuse convenient technologies that most of us take for granted. I recall visiting Amish country in Pennsylvania with a friend, Diane Zimmerman, who had written a book on their refusal to use the phone within their homes. Now the NYT has done an interesting piece on those whose refuse to use mobiles. Given our teleuse@BOP work, I found this piece about what is likely to tip a non-owner into ownership quite interesting. It is the “crisis.
Two years ago customers flocked to Etihad Atheeb Telecom, which paid USD139 million for Saudi Arabia’s second fixed-line license, bringing to an end a monopoly enjoyed by Saudi Telecom (STC). Now a group of young Saudis has organized a boycott of STC, in protest of persistently high prices and poor service, while the newcomer’s managers complain that fair competition remains a far-off goal. Ahmed Sindi, new entrant Etihad Atheeb’s chief executive, said: We have a lot of problems with the incumbent operator, and we are not seeing enough actions from the regulator to stop it. We do not have access to critical infrastructure like dark fibre; we do not have access to conduits of transmission between various cities because the pricing is very high; and interconnectivity has been delayed massively. With a young, rapidly growing population and up to 7 million expatriates, Saudi Arabia’s telecom market is one of the most coveted by local and international companies.
LIRNEasia has been pretty successful at doing policy-relevant research and communicating the results to the policy process. Interestingly we have gone deeper into the use of statistics over this period, without giving up on institutional analysis. In this context, it is quite interesting to see how the debate is playing out in the context of a US Senator’s move to prohibit federal funding of social science. What remains, though, is a nagging concern that the field is not producing work that matters. “The danger is that political science is moving in the direction of saying more and more about less and less,” said Joseph Nye, a professor at the John F.
The following quote in a recent article by a Sri Lankan disaster management expert in the government newspaper caught my attention: There was a time gap of nearly three hours between the time Indonesia was affected and the time that Sri Lanka was affected and also the coastline was hit by the wave at different times. Even within Sri Lanka, the Eastern shores were hit first, which gradually spread to North, South and finally the West. The country simply did not have an early warning and dissemination system. This was the first I had heard anyone in government admit even indirectly that many lives could have been saved if the government had communicated to the media the information it received from the Navy and STF on the East Coast. I thank the writer for that.
A m-HealthSurvey Certification Exercise was carried out as part of the m-Health Real-Time Biosurveillance Program (RTBP) to measure the usability and adoptability of the m-HealthSurvey mobile application. The exercise was conducted with health workers in Sivagangai District, Tamil Nadu, India and in Kurunegala District, Sri Lanka. The final results of the exercise will be published in the near future. m-HealthSurvey is a mobile application developed by indian Institute of technology Madras’s Rural Technology and Business Incubator (RTBI) for collecting near real-time patient disease, syndrome, and demographic data for rapid detection of disease outbreaks. It is a J2ME midlet that allows users to select categorical data as well as type information to generate patient clinical records to be submitted via GPRS to a central database.
LIRNEasia was happy to accept the invitation of Mongolia’s DREAM IT project to conduct a training workshop on communicating for influence on policy for researchers in six sub-projects. The workshop was held on 16-17 October in rapidly changing Ulaan Baator in conditions of light snow and high enthusiasm. This was LIRNEasia’s first formal interaction with Mongolia, outside the realm of capacity building. We hope the multiple contacts that were established, with researchers, with government entities, and with media will lead to deeper relations in the future.
It is asked in one of Sri Lanka’s aphorisms whether the sword that is not ready for war is to be used for cutting kos (jack fruit)? That is the same question we have to ask the Ministry of Disaster Management about its warning towers. When oh when, will the Ministry realize that these towers are a colossal waste of money and put its weight behind DEWN and cell broadcasting? But in Sri Lanka’s southern coastal village of Godawaya, a tsunami warning tower failed to emit a siren. Local fishermen who had stayed home to take part waited for a few hours and decided to go to work.
m-Health Real-Time Biosurveillance Program (RTBP) interviewed Medical Officers in Kurunegal District in Sri Lanka and Sivagangai District in Tamil Nadu, India, during the months of September and October, 2009. These interactions revealed that outpatient health record entry in real-time by Medical Officers, using the mobile phone key pad is inefficient and the idea was rejected by them. The aim of the RTBP is to collect digitized patient disease, syndrome, and demographic information from the point of care to rapidly detect disease outbreaks. Village Health Nurses in Tamil Nadu examine at most 70 patients a week. Ninety percent of the Village Health Nurses opt to jot down the records on paper and later enter them leisurely after the day’s work is complete.
This is no news, but we now have evidence. Overall, North American broadband users are certainly luckier than their South Asia counterparts. (Please note exceptions!) All four North American broadband packages tested for the Oct 2009 release performed better than any of the nine South Asian ones for value for money in accessing an international server. In other words, the USA and Canadian users pay less for the same amount of bandwidth even ignoring PPP.
A report on Benchmarking National Telecom Regulatory Authority websites, edited by the late Amy Mahan, former Senior Researcher and coordinator of LIRNE.net, is available for download here. The report takes a detailed look at the state of regulatory authority websites in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America and North America and identifies benchmarking indicators for evaluating them. Among its co-authors are LIRNEasia’s Senior Research Manager, Chanuka Wattegama, and former researcher, Lara Alawattegama. As a founding member of LIRNE, Mahan worked to ensure dissemination of the network’s research and coordinated research practices across its partner networks.
The FCC has engaged Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society to study net neutrality and its impact. Here is the draft report. Most of the highest-ranking countries use net neutrality policies, under which the incumbent carriers have to allow competitors to lease capacity on their networks and offer their own services, the Berkman report said. By contrast, the U.S.
The Finns have done it again. Accessing to Internet at minimum (not up to) 1 Mbps speed is the birthright of every Finnish citizen, announced the government. It makes Finland the world’s first country ensuring high speed broadband access a fundamental right, Telecom Asia reports. The government has also planned to make the 100 Mbps broadband connection a legal right for each countryman by the end of 2015. Finland launched the world’s first commercial GSM network in 1991.
In developing countries such as Sri Lanka, when government has no resources to deliver the essential public good of early warnings, alternate methods must be advocated – that was the idea of the HazInfo research project, where civil society in villages were given training to respond appropriately to alerts received from the Hazard Information Hub located at the Sarvodaya Head Office in Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. The technology and organizational structure of the HazInfo last-mile hazard warning system proved to work as designed and drew valuable lessons for a full scale implementation. However, the major dilemma was in finding resources to sustain the system. The Hoteliers’ Association of Sri Lanka agreed to obtain services from Sarvodaya for a fee to train and certify the hotel staff in disaster response. This fee would go towards the OPEX of the HazInfo emergency response planning component and operationalize a 24/7/365 Hazard Information Hub for issuing alerts; but to kick start the endeavor a nominal CAPEX is required.