Back in 2013, UN ESCAP, in partnership with the ITU, published an online map of the cables that carry Internet traffic in the Asia Pacific. We at LIRNEasia were very happy about this because we had been working with ESCAP since 2010 and Senior Policy Fellow Abu Saeed Khan who worked up the idea of highlighting the importance of international backhaul has been engaged with the process ever since. One usually expects novel policy initiatives to occur in the developed market economies and then to be replicated in the developing regions. In this case the order was reversed, though it is possible that the ESCAP-ECA-ITU maps may lack the level of granular detail the US map appears to be backed by. It may not look like much at first glance, but a map created by University of Wisconsin computer science professor Paul Barford and about a dozen colleagues took around four years to produce.
For the past week or so, LIRNEasia’s ICT for agriculture researchers have been interacting with three groups of coders who want to respond to our pitch described below. In Sri Lanka, a considerable amount of information relevant to farmers involved in the export sector is held within government departments and Ministries. How can we create a solution that enables farmers to receive important information vital to their work and also allow them to share information about disease outbreaks and other issues? Solution: Create an app that has information related to crop advise, the ability to take geo-tagged photographs and to upload to a platform for identifying and tracking diseases, and a platform where farmers can advertise to exporters. I understand there’s a lot of activity this weekend at the offices of WSO2 which have been volunteered for this Code4Good event.
An online publication has written about Grace Mirandilla Santos’s presentation at a recent Youth Congress on Information Technology: Citing various studies, Santos also revealed that 80% of all elementary schools or some 38,000 schools nationwide are not connected online. According to Santos’ study at LIRNEasia, ISPs give us 70% to 80% short of what they promise. “Ideally, there are more kilobytes per second you receive for every piso you pay. But it shows here that one kilobyte per peso is what we get, which is very low compared to other countries,” Santos explained. She added: “Of all the ISPs we tested, Philippine ISPs offer the lowest value for money, and that means that Filipino Internet subscribers are pretty more oppressed.
Our intervention in the most widely read English daily in Sri Lanka emphasizes the “smart” in smart cities. A middle option focuses on citizens moving through time and space in the city as the primary sensors. They generate the big data that when analyzed constitute the feedback that is the essence of a smart city. Experimentation and learning are integral to this low-cost approach. It is especially appropriate for the organically developed, congested cities in developing countries where the costs of installing and maintaining city-owned sensors would be quite high.
The Eleven News recently carried an article on propaganda being spread on Facebook. LIRNEasia disseminated the findings of a nationwide ICT baseline survey in July this year, and the numbers related to users of the Internet, and users of Facebook which we highlighted at the dissemination has been quoted in this news item. The original Myanmar version of the article can be accessed here. The translated English version is available here.
Myanmar takes another giant leap in telecoms. Burst Networks of Myanmar has engaged Swedish telecom infrastructure specialist Flexenclosure to build a multi-million dollar Tier 4 data center. This customized prefabricated modular facility will be built in the Thilawa Special Economic Zone in Yangon. Construction will take place at Flexenclosure’s factory in Vara, Sweden, with deployment in Myanmar in early 2016. It will comply with the Uptime Institute’s highly stringent classification of redundancy, fault tolerance and availability.
Dr Srinath Perera, who heads research at WSO2 and serves as an advisor to our big data team, has written a blog post with the above heading, where he makes reference to our work. Understand social dynamics like people geographic distribution, demographic distribution, mobility patterns etc to aid in policy and urban planning. This can be done through data sets like Census, CDR data, social media data ( in the right context) etc. The good news is this is already underway by Lirneasia ( see Big Data for Development Project, http://lirneasia.net/projects/bd4d/).
With 70 percent of mobile users having smartphones, Myanmar is possibly the fastest growing Internet market in the world. With rudimentary international links, this can cause all sorts of problems. One (partial) solution is content delivery networks. Internet users in Myanmar have received a speed boost as Norway’s Telenor and local company Yatanarpon Teleport (YTP) go live with Google Global Cache (GGC). This represents the first active content delivery network (CDN) resource in one of the last untapped telecommunications markets in the world.
The state of Internet in the Philippines has been subject to scrutiny by civil society and more recently the Senate office which has led the national regulatory authority to take action (link) through multiple stakeholder consultations. LIRNEasia research, through research fellow Grace Mirandilla-Santos, has been instrumental in the memorandum circular issued by the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC). Being a pertinent topic in the Philippines Grace was invited to the 13th Youth Congress on Information Technology 2015,the biggest IT event in the country, attended by computer science, IT, and engineering college students nationwide. Her presentation titled “PH Internet is bad and it’s not your fault” is available here. Photo credits: Noel Feria
Bangladesh keeps talking about launching a satellite. Sri Lanka threw some money at it, but backed off. Myanmar is talking. Now India wants to gift SAARC member countries with a satellite to be launched using ISRO’s innovative, low-cost launch capabilities. Something Keynes wrote about economics gave me the answer to the puzzle of why our region’s decision makers are so enamored with telecom satellites.
Yesterday, there was a significant announcement in Bangladesh: Robi and Airtel announced they were discussing a merger that could result in the creation of two more or less equal sized competitors to the market leader, Grameenphone. Here is my full response: This is what I said in response to a question about the number of operators in a market four years back. The market should determine the number of suppliers in a market, not government officials. This requires two things: (1) an orderly policy on market exit, whereby, for example, suppliers have clear rules on what can be done about the assigned spectrum, existing customers, and so on; and (2) transparent license and renewal procedures that allow for as many licenses to be issued as possible within the constraints of spectrum. These principles are as valid today as they were then.
The first I heard of this issue was back in the 1980s when the Government of Canada wanted banks and companies to store data within the country and not in the US where it was cheaper. One of the arguments was the need to simplify access to data for law-enforcement purposes. Technology has changed much, but the issues remain the same. Now it’s the United States Government that wants access to data stored by US companies wherever the data is. Russia wants all companies operating in Russia to store data within Russia.
A trade body is sure to know subscriber numbers. But how good is it on Internet users? May be they actually mean subscribers? India has added 52 million Internet users in first six months of the year, taking the total user base to 352 million as on June 30, 2015, industry body IAMAI said on Wednesday. Interestingly, 213 million (over 60 per cent) users accessed the worldwide web through mobile devices.
It used to be that people contributed to or initiated policy debate through the media. Now it seems that Linked In or Facebook posts are the preferred medium. There is a shortcoming in this approach in that it is not truly public, but it may bleed into the public media through journalists who participate in these private fora. Something is better than nothing. My eyes were drawn to one of the three points raised recently for the attention of Sri Lanka’s ICT Agency: ICT is not another subject anymore.
First meeting of the Working Group on the Asia-Pacific Information Superhighway was held on 1 and 2 September 2015, at the Songdo Convensia in Incheon, Republic of Korea. It was co-organized by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) and the National Information Society Agency of the Republic of Korea, with the support of the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning of the Republic of Korea. More than 40 officials from 20 governments, international and regional organizations, international financial institutions and representatives of the private sector attended this event. China Telecom Global, Rostelecom and KT came along with the Chinese, Russian and Korean government delegates. Bangladesh, Iran, and Myanmar, for the first time, have sent senior officials to draft the master plan of Asia-Pacific Information Superhighway initiative.
We have three press releases on the Myanmar teleuse baseline survey pointing out three particular stories. Press releases are available in both English and Myanmar as follow ; Fewer women own phones compared to men. But due to shared use, the usage of phones is not very different between men and women. 99% of Ward/Village Leaders carry Mobile Phones. Only 89.