Monthly Archives: October, 2009
CPRafrica 2012/CPRsouth7: call for abstracts and young scholar applications. Click here for details.
Finland made 1 Mbps every citizen’s birthright
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 [...]
Mobile Phones and Sharing Economies for sustaining last-mile early warning systems presented at Rutgers University
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 [...]
European Union shows how to evaporate public funds
The European Court of Auditors’ latest report reveals that billions of euros funding into research networks have been wasted. It says the EU’s flagship research programme spent €17 billion, almost half its budget, on two types of pan-European project without setting clear objectives. Some people in Brussels must have been smoking wrong stuff. That’s Europe’s [...]
LIRNEasia lead economist at int’l conference on mobile communication and social policy
Harsha de Silva, LIRNEasia’s lead economist, presented a paper co-authored with Dimuthu Ratnadiwakara and Ayesha Zainudeen entitled, “Social Influence in Mobile Phone Adoption: Evidence from the Bottom of Pyramid in Emerging Asia” at an International Conference on Mobile Communication and Social Policy. The conference was held at the Centre for Mobile Communications Studies, Rutgers University, New Jersey, 9-11 October [...]
Telecom NZ guilty of abusing market power: Court
New Zealand’s Commerce Commission has won a high court battle against Telecom NZ, with the court agreeing that the operator abused its market power to deter competition. The Auckland High Court held that Telecom charged disproportionately high rates for wholesale access to its data transmission access lines during the period between 2001 and 2004. This [...]
Vietnam dumps adulterated mobile statistics
The Vietnamese government has been uncomfortable with the exaggerated number of subscribers the industry claims. Growth rate and market share are the fundamental motivation of such misleading statistics. Last year the government said, “Enough is enough.” Lately the country’s Ministry of Information and Communications (MoIC) has revealed around half of the SIM cards recorded as customers [...]
Long way to go in e government services
Sri Lanka’s 1919 Government Information Center, serving 20 million people gets around 3000 calls a day, compared to New York City’s 311 service which is serving perhaps the same number of people but gets 50,000 calls a day. Long way to go .. . . not only in terms of getting citizens to use the [...]
TPRC gains interest of Washington policy officials
TPRC was the first organization set up to connect scholarly research and communication policy/regulation. CPRsouth, which is just three years old, was modeled on TPRC and EuroCPR. CPRsouth differs from its sister organizations by its explicit focus on capacity building and mentoring, tasks that are looked after by the well established universities and research institutes [...]
Incentives not intervention
That is the phrase I brought back from Harvard Forum II that I attended on behalf of LIRNEasia a few weeks back. In 2003 they held Harvard Forum I (which, among the LIRNE.NET group only Alison Gillwald attended). One of the results was the funding of organizations like LIRNEasia that seek to remove policy and [...]
You may (not) kiss the LTE Bride
Clearwire enjoys every bit of its WiMax extravaganza at the investors’ expense. Lately Intel and Google have written off more than $1.3 billion. Clearwire hasn’t blinked. It used to pitch WiMax as a mobile substitute of DSL. That never worked. Then it started claiming: WiMax is 4G and it will be better than the LTE of 3GPP camp. Noted. But now Clearwire has dropped the bomb - as par the agreement with Intel, it is not allowed to try LTE before [...]
Iran: Revolutionary Guard Telecom
The profitability and surveillance potential of the state telecom monopoly has not been missed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, described by many as the pseudogovernment of Iran: The nearly $8 billion acquisition by a company affiliated with the elite force has amplified concerns in Iran over what some call the rise of a pseudogovernment, prompting [...]
Sarvodaya Fusion launches FarmerNet
The ICT arm of Sri Lanka’s largest community-based organization, Sarvodaya, launched its FarmerNet initiative last month. They have been kind enough to mention that the initiative had been triggered by a LIRNEasia presentation at a National Telecenter Alliance event. As an organization committed to catalysis, we are gratified. And we wish them well. The premise [...]
Mobile Number Portability in emerging South Asia
The colloquium was conducted by Tahani Iqbal, Research Fellow, LIRNEasia. Mobile number portability refers to the ability for customers to retain the same number, irrespective of the operator they choose to subscribe to. The most obvious benefit of this to customers is that it lowers switching costs. One question that arises is whether it shifts [...]
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