Part of what Boards of Investment do is spin. According to the Chairman of the Sri Lanka BOI, telecom and power sector contributions will go down because tourism investments will increase, not because they are going down in absolute terms. “In the past telecoms and power sector contributed around 60 percent of FDI, while 40 percent came from other sectors,” Perera told reporters in Colombo. “In the future the telecoms and power sectors will come down to around 40 percent.” But we wonder whether this is the full story.
The colloquium was conducted by Harsha de Silva, PhD. Harsha began by explaining that the paper focus both on trains and buses, but in this colloquium will focus on the Bus transport. 75% of passenger transport is via public transport and of that 93% by bus and 7% by train. Roughly 5500 SLCTB and 18000 private buses. The fare is regulated by National Transport Commission (NTC).
We have been following the emotionally loaded net neutrality debate for some time with some detachment. Our research clearly shows that low prices are critical if the BOP is to join the Internet economy and that low prices are not sustainable without the adaptation of the budget telecom network model to broadband supply. One of the most controversial of the recommendations that came out of this work is that which said one should go gentle on regulating quality. The main reason we said that was because we believed that the poor needed access in the form of different price-quality bundles; that if high quality standards were imposed by fiat, the only victims would be the price-sensitive consumers who would get priced out. While we did not take an explicit position on net neutrality those days, we now have to, based on what we have learned.
The colloquium was conducted by Nirmali Sivapragasam. The colloquium began by that the paper is based on the T@BOP data set. The Research questions are: How aware are low-income Asian migrant workers of m-remittance services ? What socio-economic characteristics determine a migrant worker’s level of awareness? What are possible demand-side and supply-side barriers to greater awareness and use?
This colloquium was presented by Sriganesh Lokanathan, LIRNEasia. Objective: to find out how Mobile 2.0 services are and can be used in the agricultural market. Mobile 2.0 services are defined as services for more-than-voice, can include both one-way and two-way information.
The cabinet has decided to seize the regulatory functions from BTRC and give it back to the telecoms ministry in Bangladesh. Therefore, the politicians and civil servants will again assign licenses and spectrum. Even worse – they will approve the tariff and services. Welcome to the Stone Age. BTRC was born with a reasonable degree of independence on January 31, 2002.
This colloquium was presented by Sangamitra Ramachander, PhD student, Oxford university. This is an early draft, and the paper may change significantly. This is based on findings from the Teleuse@BOP3 project. The context is that in a variety of sectors, private sector do not have prior experience in serving low income and rural markets; however, now the entering. They have to decide on an appropriate price such that it is still profitable.
The UK regulator, Ofcom, has proposed cuts in interconnection fees (also known as mobile termination rates), the wholesale charges that operators make to connect calls to each others’ networks. It has unveiled plans to cut the rate in stages from 4.3 pence ($0.065) per minute to 0.005 pence per minute by 2015.