Monthly Archives: September, 2011
CPRafrica 2012/CPRsouth7: call for abstracts and young scholar applications. Click here for details.
LIRNEasia presents research at APT-TRAI event attended by Asia-Africa regulators
At the opening, Sunil Bharti Mittal had announced that Airtel was raising prices. And I was the lead on the panel of tariff regulation on the second day. I was ready for fireworks, but it was sedate. Only spark was on why roaming prices were not regulated. I first talked about where prices levels were: [...]
Smuggled mobiles erode profit of US prisons’ phone buisness
The increase of smuggled mobile phones in prisons across America has prompted the Government Accountability Office investigating any links between the high cost of landline phone calls and mobile phone use. It has been found that the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) charges high on landline calls as it uses the funds to pay for inmate [...]
Bangladesh Jute: Not a bad choice for agriculture value chain studies
I’ve been asked about how we choose our research topics. Intuition, I answer. Lot of discussion among the team and intuition. How did we choose the case studies for the research on agricultural value chains? Here, the team assembled a lot of data too. The BBC confirms their choice. It brought much-needed foreign income to [...]
Postal woes: End of the road for government monopolies?
We have worse postal services in our region. They do not have hard budget constraints, so they keep going. But the future looks bleak for those that do have hard budget constraints: Mail volume has plummeted with the rise of e-mail, electronic bill-paying and a Web that makes everything from fashion catalogs to news instantly [...]
Wireless communication of disease indicators
The end game in m health: medical monitors implanted in the body, wirelessly connected to doctors and nurses who can take remedial action. Not really something researched in Nuwan Waidyanatha’s m health projects, but still worth keeping an eye on: “If the technology delivers as promised,” Mr. Casey says, “then we believe that’s when we’ll [...]
License dependencies a hindrance to emergency communication systems
In our current emergency communication research aiming to enable interoperability between Freedom Fone and the Sahana Disaster Management System for disseminating Common Alerting Protocol messages and receiving Situational Reports over voice channels, we came a cross the situation where the 2N UMTS modem license had silently expired. During our silent-test this weekend, in preparation for [...]
Mobile operating systems will shape the future of computing, says Wired
Our world is still overwhelmingly populated by feature phones, but it won’t be long before smartphones take over (only question is when). Just yesterday we were discussing how GPS enabled smartphones, if given to government officials or even private sector people, can overcome the problem of them actually going to the places they’re supposed to [...]
An identity database as important as a road
One of the most significant ICT applications in the world is being pioneered in India: the Unique Identifier. “What we are creating is as important as a road,” said Nandan M. Nilekani, the billionaire software mogul whom the government has tapped to create India’s identity database. “It is a road that in some sense connects [...]
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