It has been business as usual in Istanbul, the largest gateway of Eurasian telecoms traffic. Turkey, unlike Egypt, has not killed the goose that lays golden eggs in terms of telecoms revenue and reputation, despite civil unrest. Jim Cowie, the CTO of Renesys Corporation, has written in his company’s blog: We examined the reachability of social networking sites from our measurement infrastructure within Turkey, and found nothing unusual. We examined the 72-hour history of measurements from inside Turkey to these sites, and found no change in normal behavior. In short: Turkey’s Internet does not appear to have changed significantly in reaction to the current protest events.
Unlike the dictators, deposed by Arab Spring, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a democratically elected and highly accomplished statesman. “Before first winning power in October 2002, the AKP (Erdogan’s party) spent 22 months interviewing in depth 41,000 people across the country. Now, even allies admit, Mr Erdogan listens mostly to himself,” remarked the Financial Times. Erdogan is now counting the losses of not consulting his fellow citizens on building a shopping mall at an old park in Istanbul. The young Turks have hit the streets, keyboards and touchscreens simultaneously amid battling with tear gas and water cannons.
Yury Sokolov is the vice-president of Rusatom Overseas, a state-owned Russian nuclear energy outfit. Bangladesh has planned for a nuclear reactor to produce commercial power with Rusatom’s help. Mr. Sokolov underscores the development of skilled manpower, management system and relevant laws prior to building the reactor. His emphasize on building proper infrastructure is striking.
Vodafone and China Mobile were an odd couple. Now the story has become curiouser. Lack of regulatory certainty has caused them to withdraw from Myanmar. Vodafone said it had withdrawn after seeing the final licence conditions, which were published on 20 May, because “the opportunity does not meet the strict internal investment criteria to which both Vodafone and China Mobile adhere”. A spokeswoman for Vodafone added that among the British company’s concerns were that a promised telecommunications bill overhauling regulation of the sector is now not due to be enacted before Burma finalises its choice of foreign mobile operator on 27 June.
In my recent visit to Colombia to assess the ICT sector for the OECD, I found that the Office of the Controlaria (Auditor General) was playing an increasingly central role in telecom policy, second-guessing decisions by policy makers and regulators years after the fact, for example requiring a Mayor responsible for the decision by a municipally owned telco to introduce ISDN many years back to compensate the municipality out of his personal funds for the resulting losses. The broader issues of government ownership raised by this story are discussed in detail in my LBO.LK Choices column. The Indian Comptroller and Auditor General was involved in telecom regulation from the 1990s, for example claiming that TRAI under the leadership of Justice Sodhi was negligent in not optimizing government revenues through BSNL. It played a decisive role in the 2G scandal that has been dragging down the Indian telecom industry for the past 2-3 years by making an inflated assessment of the losses caused.
Last year, I wrote about how the ubiquity of mobiles had helped a Bangladeshi doctor improve vaccination rates and win a Gates Foundation Prize. Here is another story about how the ubiquity of mobiles is helping improve government service delivery in Lahore, Pakistan. Even among the poorest fifth of households, 80% now use phones, so the technology can reach almost everyone. Illiteracy is a problem, but the chief minister’s call alerts a recipient to get help, if needed, with reading the text message when it arrives. It contains a specific question: did the police respond, as required, within 15 minutes of your emergency call?
LIRNEasia works on infrastructure policy and regulation. It also has expertise in disaster risk reduction. That means that we have a natural interest in critical infrastructure issues. This is an area I had published in, even before LIRNEasia came into being. The subject was on assigning responsibility for risk reduction by regulators.
Several Sinhala newspapers and webpapers have reported that the government will henceforth give priority to delivering e gov services over mobile interfaces. I assume the English media will pick up this story in due course. This is good news for a country where mobiles are ubiquitous, but conventional desktop computer use is not. We at LIRNEasia have been hammering home the message that mobile must be given priority based on our Teleuse@BOP survey research since 2005. Specifically, this was a key message in the 2011 and 2012 Future Gov conferences in Colombo.