ITU Secretary-General, Dr Hamadoun I. Touré has delivered opening speech today at World Telecommunication/ICT Policy Forum (WTPF-13). At the middle of his address Dr. Touré dramatically picked up a blue helmet of the UN Peacekeeping soldiers and said, And it is my pleasure to announce to you today … [pause] … that we are not taking over the Internet. The UN peacekeepers, in their blue helmets, … [pause] … are not coming to take over the world’s IXPs.
Banglalion, one of the two Broadband Wireless Access (BWA aka WiMAX) operators, has filed a lawsuit against Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) for awarding a pair of 10 megahertz of spectrum in 800 MHz band at “free of cost.” Evidently the whole issue has been scandalous all the way: BTRC commissioner, ATM Monirul Alam, admitted that the 800MHz band was declared very important by the International Telecommunication Union, only to point out that the spectrum was allocated to NGGL before the international body’s declaration. The spectrum was allocated on August 10, 2011 for a year on condition of using it properly. The government renewed its contract last December, 15 months after the original allocation. .
The demand for massive data centers close to consumers will increase rapidly as cloud services proliferate and data traffic increases. Yet, they will not emerge everywhere. Just having cheap renewables-based electricity is not enough, as is shown by Singapore and Dubai becoming attractive sites. A whole eco-system is needed. “There is major demand coming from IT-enabled service providers, online portals, e-commerce companies, stock brokerages, and insurance firms,” said Sunil Gupta, president and chief operating officer at Netmagic Solutions, a data centre company which was acquired by Japan’s NTT in January 2012.
Sri Lanka and Pakistan partially privatized their incumbent fixed telecom operators more or less at the same time competition was introduced. India, Bangladesh and Nepal did not. Bad move. The lumbering monsters could not compete. The sad state of the Indian incumbents who have been fed more subsidies than it is possible to imagine is thus described.
When LIRNEasia people were on the field interviewing BOP teleusers in Indonesia in 2011, we saw the proliferation of cheap smartphones. It appears from this report that this trend is moving to Sri Lanka as well. But the company says they will offer smart phones for as little as 15,000 rupees to close in the market gap of feature phone in the island. “We will offer smart phones at low prices to the masses to close the market gap of feature phones” Kalpa Perera, Samsung’s manger, mobile business in Sri Lanka said. Last year the phone company had sold half a million handsets of all types in Sri Lanka.
Yesterday Syria fell off the Internet. Clean cut. Then it came back. Why was it cut? Why did it come back?
The world’s largest democracy, in terms voters, now comprehensively monitors every phone call, text message, email and online activities of its citizens and indeed the visitors’. Welcome to India, where the government has built a US$74 million Central Monitoring System. This third eye of the spy outfits is claimed to be used for enforcing “reasonable security practices and procedures” within the country. But privacy and internet freedom advocates are predictably critical. Pranesh Prakash, director of policy at the Centre for Internet and Society, said: “In the absence of a strong privacy law that promotes transparency about surveillance and thus allows us to judge the utility of the surveillance, this kind of development is very worrisome.
Gyanendra’s Law states that those who pull the killswitch do not remain in power too long. Supporting this thesis, Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad has kept his hands off the killswitch for the most part, except at the start of the civil war, and today. Four physical cables connect Syria to the Internet — three under the sea, and the fourth over land through Turkey. For outsiders to cause Tuesday’s outage, security experts say, they would have had to physically cut all four cables simultaneously. That does not appear to have happened in this case, according to security experts.
Viber, the mobile OTT Young Turk, has invaded the turf of Skype with 200 million users. Taking completely opposite route of Skype, the startup has now launched Viber 3 version desktop application with video calls. It will enable video calls for mobile followed by group videoconferencing in the future to cause further bleeding of Skype. Viber has also beefed up its Android and iOS apps, while introducing support for eight new languages (reaching a total of 27), the company said in a press release. Meanwhile, Viber’s meteoric rise will further complicate the US government’s desperation to “wiretap people who communicate using the Internet rather than by traditional phone services.
We at LIRNEasia grapple with the challenge of charting the influence of our research on policy in environments where the norm is not to attribute where ideas were taken from. One solution that we have tried is that of using identifiable memes in our communication, hoping that they will reappear in policy documents. The personal slogan of a Chinese leader is pretty important, as documented by the Economist. Where did the slogan come from? Quite possibly the New York Times.
It is not only the largest mobile operator in Japan by subscribers with a 45% market share. NTT DoCoMo also carries nearly all the mobile traffic of the crooks and criminals, said the country’s National Police Agency. NTT DoCoMo’s two rivals, KDDI and Softbank, sell number of corporate connections according to the headcounts of a business entity. Softbank Mobile checks the purpose of subscription before closing deals with corporate clients. Its dealers are also obligated to verify the customer’s identity.
Bhutan Telecom is launching Long Term Evolution (LTE) service in two locations of its capital city Thimpu. Coverage of this 1800 MHz network will encompass a radius of up to 1km, promising a theoretical downlink speed of up to 40Mbps. Cellular News reports. Meanwhile, the fate of 3G in Bangladesh looks as gloomy as its political future. The regulator could not appoint a consultant for auctioning the 2.
At LIRNEasia we study and teach about regulation. In March-April we spent some effort seeking to contribute to what we saw as an effort to remedy some long-standing political failures through transparent, consultative processes set in motion by Sri Lanka’s Public Utilities Commission of Sri Lanka (PUCSL). Our recommendations were not accepted, but we still hope the remedy will itself survive political failure. In the aftermath of the protests and the President’s overruling of the PUCSL, several observers have suggested that the PUCSL is a redundant entity that should be wound up. I agree that it failed in this instance and that it has done grievous harm to itself and to the essential process of moving toward cost-reflective tariffs.
Policy Tracker, a Spectrum Management research and training outfit, has referred to a report of SBR Juconomy Consulting, which has studied 15 benchmark countries and detected some significant variations in the policy approaches for spectrum pricing among them. The countries this study has covered are: Germany, France, UK, Switzerland, USA, Canada, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, United Arab Emirates, and Jordan. Jörg Kittl, a co-author of the study, told Policy Tracker most countries defined the optimal and efficient usage of spectrum as the primary goal, but some emphasized other aspects such as economic and social benefits, competition or public interest. Western countries focus on maximising the optimal use of spectrum. Others, for example in Africa, the Middle East or parts of Asia, have different approaches, including maximising the value of spectrum and income for the government.
Two weeks back we cautioned about India’s diminishing role as an unavoidable stopover in Eurasian telecoms connectivity. Now India’s Reliance has joined the Bay of Bengal Gateway (BBG) consortium to build an 8,000 kilometer submarine cable system to link Singapore and Penang with Oman via India and Sri Lanka. It has planned to commence carrying commercial traffic by end of 2014. Other members of the consortium are: Telekom Malaysia, Vodafone, Omantel, Etisalat and Dialog Axiata. It is lot more than just another submarine cable.