Governments like subsidies. We do not mind, as long as they do not harm competition and are deployed intelligently. One big complaint we had about the Indian Universal Service Fund was that it was not being used (as was the even bigger fund accumulated by Brazil). The Indian government responded with a USD 4 billion plus plan to roll out fiber to village cluster level. That will be among the policy initiatives that will be discussed at ITU Telecom World Forum, 21 November 2013 in Bangkok.
Next week, Senior Policy Fellow Abu Saeed Khan will be among the earliest speakers at ITU’s big tamasha, coming back to our part of the work after some time. In addition to Abu, who will discuss the work we are doing in partnership with UNESCAP to improve the resilience and reduce the costs of Asia’s international backhaul capacity, Reg Coutts, a member of the CPRsouth Board is also scheduled to speak. PSA1 : Riding the Data Wave Tuesday, 19 Nov 2013, 14:15 – 15:45, Jupiter 8 The plethora of new wireless devices reaching international markets is facilitating innovative business models but stressing the ability of fixed and mobile networks to keep pace. Wireless has for some time provided basic connectivity in Asia but the data storm that has hit European and North American markets will present new challenges to operators due to the shortage of high capacity back haul. ‘Front-hauling’ is one of the techniques that have been promoted as a solution but its use of scarce spectrum presents other difficulties.
LIRNEasia has been engaged with the telecom reform process in Myanmar for some time now. Back in 2012, I published an op ed inside Mynamar entitled, “Myanmar is last in world for telecoms: What can be done?” Last month, another article was published, this time in Bamar. The tone was a lot more optimistic. At this moment we are working on comments on the draft regulations drafted under the new law.
That was a tough header to compose. How was it that an Indian company that had the largest share of the Indian market was importing mobile devices from China? Anyway, that has been the case so far. It’s about to change. Not necessarily true that making things in India will be cheaper.
Little data is as bad a term as big data. Really tells you very little. But sadly that is what the New York Times has chosen to use. And I have not had time to come up with something little more insightful. David Soloff is recruiting an army of “hyperdata” collectors.
The timeline below depends on the regulations (by-laws) being approved. The news story suggest they have been. We know that they are open for comments. We plan to give comments by the Dec 2 deadline. So unless the licenses are being developed in parallel, the chances of issuance by year end are not that good.
I was at the World Innovation Summit on Education (WISE 13) in Doha, Qatar, last week. The week before I was speaking at the Internet Governance Forum in Bali, Indonesia. At both these events reliable, high-quality, available-on-demand broadband is a precondition for what the people there want to do. For example, everyone at WISE 13 had great expectations (or fears) about MOOCs. Some even went so far as thinking that MOOCs could be some kind of conspiracy against the developing countries, whereby our people would be limited to MOOCs, some kind of poor substitute for real higher education.
LIRNEasia’s Senior Policy Fellow has been invited by the Department of Communication of South African government to speak at the “Workshop on Broadband Policy and Implementation in South Africa,” 11-12 November 2013, at CSIR Conference Center, Pretoria. He will speak on the “The Trans-Asian Terrestrial Broadband Link,” drawing on the work he has been doing as part of LIRNEasia’s partnership with UNESCAP.
That is the title of a recent book by Clayton Christensen, an admired management guru. It’s a question (in slightly more modest form) I frequently ask. I asked it when I was at the Telecom Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka: how could we measure what good we did? Result: Telecom Policy and Regulatory Environment tool. We ask it all the time at LIRNEasia.
India’s Telecom Commission, composed of civil servants, is pushing for higher reserve prices of mobile phone spectrum. Their recommendation for 1800 MHz and 900 MHz prices are respectively 15% and 25% higher than what the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has suggested for auction. India plans to conduct its next mobile phone spectrum auction in January 2014 to fork out estimated 110 billion rupees. In September the TRAI has suggested to slash the auction reserve prices up to 65% after most of the operators have stayed away from bidding in the previous two auctions due to high reserve price. The Telecom Commission has, however, suggested to increase the spectrum prices by sweetening with attractive mergers allowance of a combined market share of up to 50% instead of the current 35% cap.
I remember tweeting several months back about the negative fallout of the drip drip of the Snowden revelations on cloud companies and even on the routing of data traffic (why is it so difficult to find something you’ve written in social media?). In my interactions with industry people across Asia, I could sense the unease of entrusting anything valuable to American companies. But now it seems to have percolated up to the top: But protests from business executives, who told Mr. Obama last week at a White House meeting that they feared the N.
This is not to dismiss the idea of connecting via mobile phones. I have spent the last few years researching the challenges of pulling together real connectivity and access for the poorest, and it’s no picnic. Infrastructure constraints, high taxes on imported computers, low income levels and connectivity problems all make the internet extremely challenging for the poorest to access. But is this a reason to give up entirely and focus on mobile instead as policymakers and researchers seem to be doing? At the Internet Governance Forum in Indonesia last week, the prevailing view was that the developing world would use mobile, end of story.
It is too easy to rant about surveillance on the web (except when one is subject of a crime). I was fortunate that I met a number of FBI and police personnel who were getting into crime investigations on the web at the early Computers, Freedom and Privacy conferences and learned to see the problem from their perspective. Now there is a book on the subject. Here is an excerpt from the NYT review: “Life is a messy business on the Internet,” Anderson writes, “and we’re never going to engineer the mess out of it.” He’s right.
Information and communication have always opened opportunities for the poor to earn income, reduce isolation, and respond resiliently to emergencies. With mobile phone use exploding across the developing world, even marginalized communities are now benefiting from modern communication tools. This book explores the impacts of this unprecedented technological change. Drawing on unique household surveys undertaken by research networks active in 38 developing countries, it helps to fill knowledge gaps about how the poor use information and communication technologies (ICTs). How have they benefited from mobile devices, computers, and the Internet?