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LIRNEasia joins hands with Sarvodaya village for its grass root work
Little ones with Anthuriums in their hands greet us. Mederigama near Mawanella (about 1-2 km off Kandy road) is a tiny hamlet where LIRNEasia’s International Advisory Board members would directly interact with the Sri Lankan rural life.
Sarvodaya has been present in this village for so long that nobody is sure when things started. We learn [...]
How broad is your broadband?
Based on LIRNEasia’s broadband QoSE research findings, we ran an advertisement in the Daily Mirror (Sri Lanka’s leading English daily) on 24 November 2009. The advertisement focused on four facts. The first three were on value for money, advertised download speed as opposed to actual download speed and bandwidth bottlenecks. The lack of regulation on [...]
NRA Websites: Benchmarking National Telecom Regulatory Authority Websites
A report on Benchmarking National Telecom Regulatory Authority websites, edited by the late Amy Mahan, former Senior Researcher and coordinator of LIRNE.net, is available for download here.
The report takes a detailed look at the state of regulatory authority websites in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America and North America and identifies benchmarking indicators for [...]
ITU and LIRNEasia to host household-survey training course in Bangkok
LIRNEasia and the International Telecommunications Union are organizing a 5 day training course on “Measuring ICT Access and Use by Households and Individuals” in Bangkok, Thailand from 19 – 23 October 2009. The local host of the meeting is the Ministry of Information Ministry of Information and Communication Technology (MICT), Thailand. [...]
ICTs to address the language barrier?
Today, Rohan Samarajiva delivered a speech at TEDx Colombo held at the Punchi Theater, entitled “Government services: Anytime, anywhere, any official language, now.”
Much emphasis was laid on the usage of ICT in order to help trilingual government service delivery. Using the T@BOP data he illustrated the popularity of mobiles among the Sri Lankan BOP, and [...]
Call clarity: Has Skype or broadband quality improved?
LIRNEasia’s most recent colloquium, Mobile 2.0: m-money for the unbanked was held via Skype. Erwin Alampay (PhD) , LIRNEasia research fellow, presented his working paper mobile 2.0 on m-money, from Manila, Philippines, via Skype to participants in three separate locations: Colombo, Sri Lanka (at LIRNEasia’s office), Yunnan, China and Bangkok, Thailand.
Unlike previous virtual colloquia, where [...]
Pakistan Telecom Authority shows futility of raising mobile taxes
The Pakistan Telecom Authority in their December 2008 quarterly review gives the reasoning behind the government’s decision to impose high taxes on mobile phone use. To reduce the high fiscal deficits, the government had increased taxes. The increase for the telecom sector was over 40 percent; for other sectors it was only [...]
Broadband Quality War: Are you a Winner or a Loser?
A public seminar will be held at the Institute of Engineers, Sri Lanka auditorium on the 29th April 2009 from 5.30 to 8.00 PM. The seminar will be conducted by Prof. Timothy Gonsalves and R. Thirumurthy from the Indian Institute of Technology (Madras) and Chanuka Wattegama from LIRNEasia. The seminar will be followed [...]
Reducing roaming rates; making South Asian regional integration real
Prof. Rohan Samarajiva discuss about Reducing roaming rates in South Asian regional in his article Regional Roaming for the Choices column in Lanka Business Online.
In 2006, Zain Africa took a step that led to the abolition of roaming charges and made a significant contribution to economic integration of the East African region. They did more for [...]
Bangladesh; Leased line prices down, but are the customers benefited?
Bangladesh leased line prices have dropped 74%, according to LIRNEasia’s February 2009 benchmarking study. But this reduction has not been passed onto consumers, who are still paying roughly the same price as they did in October 2008. The consumer also receiving less for what he’s paying – our February 2009 broadband quality of service tests showed that speeds experienced by [...]
Release of Mobile, Broadband and International Voice Price Benchmarks : February 2009
Findings from LIRNEasia’s bi-annual price benchmarks study for February 2009 (a part of LIRNEasia’s continuing program on Indicators for 2008-10 ) is available for download below:
Mobile Price Benchmarks: South Asia
Mobile Price Benchmarks: Southeast Asia
Broadband Price Benchmarks: South and Southeast Asia
International Voice Benchmarks
The findings are from the month of February. The next publication will [...]
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