CPRsouth seeks to encourage evidence-based interventions by members. It was a happy coincidence that an op-ed by a paper-giver at CPRsouth7 appeared in print while she was at the conference in Mauritius. She had written it up based on the paper delivered there: The diagram shows the percentage increase from 2009 to 2010 in the number of Facebook users among the top five countries on Facebook and the largest increase was recorded in Indonesia (793 percent). Using web analytics, it was found that Facebook was a popular upstream site that online users visited prior to their visit to official government websites. Over 70 percent of Facebook users in Indonesia access the social media site through their mobile phones (Facebook, 2011).
Having a customer-centric sector seems a good idea. The Ministry seeing its primary function as that of taxing operators a tad problematic. What is a public switchboard telephone network? But this is what is trickling out of Myanmar. “The Department of Posts and Telecommunications will be coordinated by the Ministry of Communications, Posts and Telegraphs, which will tax operators,” U Kyaw Soe said.
LIRNEasia is the administrative partner of CPRsouth, an entity that seeks to build ICT policy intellectuals in the South. As with most of the administrative activities we undertake, we treat CPRsouth as a research project too. The heavy lifting is done by LIRNEasia’s Human Capital Research Program headed by Sujata Gamage. The slideset that was prepared based on her research and presented to the Board at its meeting on September 7, 2012 showed that for an inter-disciplinary group, CPRsouth was making rapid progress in the transition to a real network. One of the most important slides showed that the average ages of paper-presenters and young scholars were 34 years and 29 years respectively.
Ayesha Zainudeen, Senior Research Manager at LIRNEasia, spoke at the recent expert meeting of the UNESCAP in Colombo. Below is a long quote. There is more at FT. Other than voice, it’s mostly SMS use, along with missed calling. Voice connectivity is almost ubiquitous.
At LIRNEasia, we do not focus solely on ICTs. For some time, we’ve been looking at demographic structure as a factor. Both the recent Afghanistan and Bhutan Sector Performance Reviews contained sections on demography. The demographic time bomb, the increase in the aged population before a country has had time to get rich and establish a safety net is less written about than the good stuff, but is perhaps the more important. Here is a senior official from China talking about it: Since 2004 the shrinking supply of — and increasing demand for — labour has led to wide labour shortage and rapid inflation of wages.
Bangladesh has been ranked 55th among the 61 countries globally and very last in the Asia-Pacific region in the 2012 Web Index. India was ranked 33, Pakistan 44 and Nepal 52 among the South Asian countries. The index has, however, excluded Sri Lanka for unknown reason. It has been compiled by the World Wide Web Foundation, which was launched in November 2009 by the father of Internet – Tim Berners-Lee. The ranking is worked out by considering each country’s web usage in terms of the percentage of web users within the country and the content they have available.
Establishing causal relationships is tough in social science, a field defined by open systems and knowledgeable agents. It is extremely difficult with regard to policy actions and outcomes. In 1998-99 when I was the public face of telecom reform in Sri Lanka, I used to get lots of invitations to speak at business events. In these talks I had to maintain a delicate balance, between giving the then government and its predecessor the right amount of credit for the incredible outcomes that were becoming visible. The government in power had been in place for four years and had partially privatized the incumbent operator and given its management to a Japanese investor, among other things.
In its first Annual General Meeting held in Denarau Island, Fiji, Pacific ICT Regulatory Resource Centre (PIRRC) elected its new Steering Committee and Management Committee. The Steering Committee consists of representatives of Cook Island, FIJI, Papua...
The agriculture research done by LIRNEasia included a study into the knowledge and information gaps in the Sri Lankan rubber supply chain. Members of the research team, Sriganesh Lokanathan (Senior Research Manager) and Nilusha Kapugama (Research Manager) were invited to share some of their findings with the consultants involved with the finalization and validation of the Sri Lanka Rubber Industry Master Plan, funded by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) under the City Cluster Economic Development Project. The discussion, held at the rubber secretariat in Colombo, revolved around the creation and sustainability of farmer associations among rubber smallholders. The consultants were particularly interested in a successful rubber smallholder association in Pandeniya, Sri Lanka. The LIRNEasia researchers spoke about the factors that led to the success of the smallholder association in Pandeniya such as financial and technical assistance to set up their operations, ability maintain control of the quality of their rubber and above all the leadership and commitment exhibited by their members.
The Tokyo Olympics marked the inflection point in the adoption of color television. Will the London Olympics of 2012 be remembered as the inflection point for hybrid wireless networks? The service, which was used by a half million people during the Olympics, was initially free to all consumers. Starting this month, it has been available for a fee to other mobile users. Virgin plans to lease its Wi-Fi underground network to competitors.
The pre-conference tutorials for the 7th of the CPRsouth conferences just started, here in Port Louis, Mauritius. I am teaching a unit tomorrow on research-to-policy. The slides are here. It is not easy for a capacity-building enterprise such as CPRsouth to provide evidence of efficacy in terms of taking research to policy. By definition, capacity building is a long game involving relatively young people (the average age of paper presenters is 34 years; of young scholars is 29).
Apparently a gap that cannot be bridged has opened up in smartphone sales thanks to sub USD200 smartphones from Huawei and others. let us be thankful the gap is only in smartphones. Smartphones are so popular here that it’s difficult to avoid seeing one, and in China, these devices are poised to become even more widespread. This year, China will account for 26.5 percent of all smartphone shipments, compared to 17.
CPRsouth is LIRNEasia’s principal capacity building vehicle. It has, from the beginning, been shaped by research on networks. It is also an object of research for the Human Capital Research Program at LIRNEasia. We were therefore pleased that a research paper looking at the metrics of CPRsouth performance was accepted at the 40th anniversary conference of TPRC, September 21-23, 2012 at the George Mason School of Law, just outside Washington DC. Link to paper.
The above is a paraphrase of a eye-catching title of a paper being read at TPRC 2012, on September 22, 2012, by LIRNEasia Research Fellow Faheem Hussain. Congratulations to Faheem on getting his paper accepted at the oldest ICT policy research conference.
For some time, we have been engaged in the task of improving the way Internet users are counted. We are in agreement with the ITU that the best way of counting Internet users is through demand-side surveys. According to reports, China conducts regular surveys on Internet use. Yet, the ITU does not use these data. Why?
In May LIRNEasia responded to a consultation on proposals for VAS licensing in Bangladesh. Our response received wide coverage too. It appears that we (among others) may have influenced the government’s response, as reported in the Daily Star. The telecom ministry will form a five-member panel to examine the issues related to mobile phone value-added service (VAS). The decision came yesterday at a meeting attended by Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) and ministry officials and representatives of mobile operators and content developers.