Today, after just eight years in existence, Facebook now has more than 750 million users all by itself. At that astonishing rate of growth, the company is on track to accomplish much more than just a multibillion-dollar IPO. Facebook is on the cusp of becoming a medium unto itself—more akin to television as a whole than a single network, and more like the entire web than just one online destination. The evidence for that transformation goes well beyond the sheer number of users. Many businesses now bypass the traditional web altogether, limiting their online presence to Facebook. Already the platform has spawned one billion-dollar company (the social gaming giant Zynga) and swallowed another (the photo network Instagram). The average time people spend on the site has increased from four and a half hours per month in 2009 to nearly seven hours—more than twice that of any major web competitor.

The results were far more dramatic. Well after the financial help and hand-holding had stopped, the families of those who had been randomly chosen for the BRAC programme were eating 15% more, earning 20% more each month and skipping fewer meals than people in a comparison group. They were also saving a lot. The effects were so large and persistent that they could not be attributed to the direct effects of the grants: people could not have sold enough milk, eggs or meat to explain the income gains. Nor were they simply selling the assets (although some did).

LIRNEasia is a regional think tank that has, among other things, conducted research on VAS in Bangladesh. The comments below are based on (a) examination of the policy, regulatory and business issues pertaining to mobile VAS in the context of LIRNEasia’s 2008-2010 research program on mobile 2.0; and (b) detailed analysis of the practical experience of CellBazaar, a successful VAS developed in Bangladeshi conditions. The peer-reviewed journal article on a successful Bangladeshi value-added service, CellBazaar, is attached. LINK.

I also contributed to a report on ICT development in LDCs, of which Bangladesh is one: ITU, The role of ICT in advancing growth in least developed countries: Trends, challenges and opportunities. Geneva: ITU. This report outlines policy and regulatory good practices and makes specific references to value-added services offered by ANS operators. It does not recommend that ANS operators be prohibited from offering VAS.

No need for VAS licensing (entire document)
There is no rationale for VAS licensing that would be supported by present knowledge on ICT policy and regulation. Licenses are rarely issued at this granular level. At most, they would be “class licenses” that would impose certain minimal obligations and enable the regulator to contact the VAS provider if necessary.

Licensing is especially inappropriate at the present time, when mobile apps (primarily for smartphones but also for feature phones) are attracting significant venture capital (for example: Worthham, Jenna (2012, April 10), A billion-dollar turning point for mobile apps, New York Times). When the trend is for vast numbers of micro enterprises to develop applications that would be bought and sold on virtual “app stores,” the last thing one should do is impose onerous licensing requirements.

The enforcement of the prohibition of unlicensed apps on smartphones will be exceedingly difficult. The unintended consequence will be discouragement of local entrepreneurship and the widespread use of apps obtained from foreign sources.

Provision of mobile apps on feature phones requires active participation by ANS operators, since the app would have to “live” on the network given the limitations of the handset. In particular, “discovery” (ensuring that the potential customers become aware of VAS on offer) and payment for services (in the context of countries like Bangladesh where credit-card penetration is low) operators will play a critical role. The exclusion of operators from the provision of VAS would be inimical to the development of VAS for feature phones, used predominantly by the poor. The proposed licensing rules may thus be justifiably described as being anti-poor.

Intention appears to be disintegration of value chain (Clauses 6, 7 & 8)
The draft appears to be based on the faulty premise that it is necessary to enforce vertical disintegration of value added services and the provision of access network services. There is no international precedent for this. While it may be necessary to encourage fair treatment of VAS providers, it is unwise and impractical to (a) prevent ANS operators from offering VAS; and (b) expropriating the VAS services they have already developed legally and in full expectation of future revenues and synergistic support to other service offerings.

As documented in the ITU Report cited above (p. 48), standard contracts with 30:70 revenue splits that favor app developers are becoming the norm without regulatory intervention. It appears that forced disintegration is seeking to solve a non-existent problem.

The LIRNEasia study of CellBazaar shows that (a) it is possible for an independent VAS producer to become successful in Bangladesh without government licensing and intervention; and (b) that it may make sense for all concerned including the VAS entrepreneur to sell the service to the ANS at a certain point. The proposed rules seek to solve a non-existent problem and create a new one by depriving developers of access to capital and ready buyers for their businesses.

Expropriation of legally developed services creates a harmful precedent (Clause 8.8)
If we stay with the concrete example of CellBazaar, clause 8.8 results in the forcible expropriation of a business developed by Kamal Qadir and purchased in good faith by Grameenphone. The implications are broad and can negatively affect the entire sector and indeed the investment climate of the entire country.

I shall be pleased to elaborate on any of the above points or assist the Ministry to find productive ways to achieve the objectives of Digital Bangladesh. This proposal is harmful to the achievement of Digital Bangladesh objectives and should be withdrawn.

These questions were investigated in an action research project by LIRNEasia in partnership with Sarvodaya, Sri Lanka’s largest development organisation. Experimenting with Sahana disaster management software and Freedom Fone interactive voice response system, it probed how voice-based reporting can fit into globally accepted standards for sharing emergency data. It found that while the technology isn’t perfect yet, there is much potential.

FOR the past decade, technical support has been in the vanguard of globalisation. With the costs of intercontinental communication shrivelling to virtually nothing, phone and online customer services have migrated to wherever they can be managed most efficiently and cheaply. India blazed the trail, building a $5 billion outsourcing business on helping Westerners solve high-tech niggles.

Recently, the Philippines has taken over as the world’s call-centre hotspot, offering comparable wage costs to India, with the added benefit—at least to North American ears—of a Yankee drawl. But even as half a million Filipino customer-service representatives urge callers to have a nice day, they may want to peer over their shoulders.

Some of the biggest brands in software, consumer electronics and telecoms have now found a workforce offering expert advice at a fraction of the price of even the cheapest developing nation, who also speak the same language as their customers, and not just in the purely linguistic sense. Because it is their customers themselves.

The Library of Congress will award the $1 million John W. Kluge Prize for lifetime intellectual achievement in the humanities and social sciences to Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who had a distinguished international career as a scholar before twice being elected president of Brazil. An official announcement will be made in Washington on Monday, with an awards ceremony there on July 10.

Report.

European lawmakers on Thursday approved a plan to extend and lower the Continent’s limits on mobile phone roaming charges paid by consumers for another five years, and added the first controls on mobile Internet use.

In addition to the caps, the legislation adopted by the European Parliament will allow E.U. residents to buy roaming services from a carrier besides their regular operator beginning in 2014, an attempt to create competition in the market that will lower prices and supplant the need for price controls.

Report.

Time and time again we hear of the shortcomings arising from unplanned and ad-hoc procedures carried out in the presence of hazard events. The past experience being the 2012 April 11 Sumatra earthquake. There were no proper procedures to determine the effects of the earthquake. Simply fearing and anticipating the ultimate (i.e. playing safe than sorry), one and only action is to evacuate all 2-3 KM inland. Beware of the consequence of over alerting.

Had their been proper inter-agency communication, not just nationally but regionally, then a simple procedure would be to alert the first responders to man their stations, then monitor the updates from Indonesia or other regional agencies to be informed and be attuned to the situation before executing evacuation plans. If, Indonesia gets hit then execute evacuations; else stand down with an “all clear” message sent to the first-responders. Evacuations are not cheap there’s a cost in it for all, both the public and private sectors.

The, 2011 November 21, Matara Mini-cyclone had agencies bestowed with responsibilities failing to rise to the occasion at the time of need. Then agencies that were unauthorized to issue alerts, but stood up to the moment for the greater good of saving lives, were punished. There’s a simple solution to breaking these silos or rivalry and integrating them for the sake of handling emergencies in a smart and responsible way; and that is by creating a “Register of Alerting Authorities” to decentralize the alerting with policies allowing, not just disaster management but, all agencies holding a stake to act with jurisdiction and hazard specific alerting rights.

Step 1 – Establishing the Register of Alerting Authorities. It is the first step towards developing a Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) country profile, which defines the jurisdictions, who can alert whom for what hazards, so on and so forth.

Step 2 – Agree on and mandate the country CAP-Profile. The CAP-Profile for Sri Lanka was developed and field tested during the 2005-2008 HazInfo project for bridging the last-mile. Thereafter, modified to test it in the Biosurveillance work for disseminating health alert.

Step 3 – Adopt a situational-awareness and alerting software tool. Once the CAP profile is established it easy to implement and operationalize the Sahana CAP Broker, which LIRNEasia has been researching, developing, and field testing over the past half a decade. The Sahana CAP Broker was field tested in the HazInfo, Biosurveillance, and recently in voice-enabled alerting to activate Community Emergency Response Team members.

These three steps, especially, the software allows for the integration, decentralization, and monitoring of the alerting responsibilities. A simple procedure, with the use of the Sahana CAP Broker, in relation to the Matara Mini Cyclone incident would be:

1. Meteorological department identifies the potential threat of the Mini Cyclone and posts and issues an alert to which relevant agencies such as the Fisheries Department would subscribe to.

2. The Fisheries Department that maintains a contact list of Fishermen in the Matara District send an SMS to the Fishermen.

3. The Matara District Disaster Management Center issues a Cell Broadcast to targeting citizens in the Matara District coastal and vulnerable areas.

4. The National Disaster Management Center notifies the TV and Radio stations to make the public aware of the threat.

LIRNEasia is in par with developing countries in terms of research and developments, when it comes to emergency communication, that take in to account of the latest technology developments and procedures. However, LIRNEasia is not proud of rejoicing to a level that the positive findings are nationalized. Even the Canadians have learned from our research to adopt last-mile warning strategies for their remote Inuit villages as well as adopting CAP recommendations such as defining priority level for response strategies. Despite sharing our knowledge and making it available at the doorstep, Sri Lanka lags in establishing an effective and streamlined warning and alerting procedures. Nevertheless, developed countries, on the contrary, are quick to grab the new ideas and implement them to it’s fullest.

Here’s an example -

Multi Agency Situational Awareness System (MASAS) was the highlight of the ISCRAM2012 with Jack Pagatto showcasing their innovation in their efforts to unite emergency coordination and real-time information exchange between agencies in Canada. MASAS is a simple spatial and temporal application that displays all kinds of situations-awareness messages on a map; or “CAP on a MAP” as us CAP adopters call it. The messages can be filtered labelled and shared with any other system or organization. The sharing of information is through simple CAP messaging. The CAP CAN (or CAP Canada) is a well established CAP profile that was advocated through Environmental Canada. MASAS takes advantage of the policies and system efficiencies around the CAP standard and the Canadian CAP profile.

Jack Pagatto began his keynote speech with an example of a case related to a teenager’s unfortunate and preventable death. The thirteen year old boy was suffering from a sever respiratory attack (chronic asthma) and his elder sister, in the absence of their parents, called the paramedics. When the ambulance arrived in the near vicinity of patient’s home the paramedics encountered a stretch of unmotorable flood waters, as a result had to detour, which took an additional 20 minutes to arrive at the scene. By then the boy had passed on. Such a incident could have been prevented if, the ambulatory service was aware of the local flood situation. MASAS is the catalyst for sharing situational reports across all agencies in efforts to prevent similar situations in the future. It works in a way that all agencies with a stake in emergency work have rights and privileges to post alerts at any level.

Keeping in mind, CAP is the underlying play maker that allows for MASAS to be a success with interagency emergency data exchange in real-time. “NIEM Simplified” is a video that elegantly summarizes the discrepancies around disparate systems prohibiting swift and accurate data interchange between systems and organizations. CAP is the solution to this problem that fosters a National Information Exchange Model (NIEM). However, there are complexities with uncertainties and fear factor of sharing real-time emergency information. The solution is to simplify the problem and “keep it simple with CAP”, Pagatto says.

In our Real-Time Biosurveillance work, this is exactly what we did; thus, take the over 100s of records coming from each clinical facility every day, then present them to Epidemiologists using temporal and spatial data visualization methods offered by the T-Cube Web Interface. Additionally, provide them with tools to drill into and apply statistical analyses methods to look for unusual patterns in the large data set. However, my talk at ISCRAM2012 was not on the health work but on the voice-based emergency communication to offer easy to use and affordable technologies for enhancing Community Emergency Response Team members with information exchange.

David emphasized that ontologies and data dictionaries can improve data quality; moreover, machine learning systems improve the ROC and AMOC. Economic theory bounded risk based decision strategy are far more effective than people’s perceptions. Chains of reasoning are a powerful way to and tools that can support such reasoning are what is needed in aid of decision support. Data visualization provides that power. Moreover, visualization is a great way to protect privacy with guided levels of aggregation and access control to avoid ramifications.

He has written a recent piece in the Boston Review, not based on his own research, but on a range of work, including one of his students.

People using the Internet, most studies show, increase the volume of their meaningful social contacts. E-communications do not generally replace in-person contact. True, serious introverts go online to avoid seeing people, but extroverts go online to see people more often. People use new media largely to enhance their existing relationships—say, by sending pictures to grandma—although a forthcoming study shows that many more Americans are meeting life partners online. Internet dating is especially fruitful for Americans who may face problems finding mates, such as gays and older women. Finally, people tell researchers that electronic media have enriched their personal relationships.

People typically turn new technologies into devices for doing what they have always wanted to do. And people like to stay in touch. A century ago, Americans, especially women, turned two new technologies marketed for other purposes, the telephone and automobile, into “technologies of sociability.” Developers of the Internet meant it to be a tool for the military and for scholars, and only a few imagined it might even serve business. Now users have made the Internet a largely social technology. (Not all new technologies develop this way; books and television are other, asocial stories.)

Worth a read, asocially.

Therefore, it is pleasing to be able to report that LIRNEasia has insisted on making its publicly funded research, publicly available, with almost no exceptions.

Our starting point is very simple. The Coalition is committed to the principle of public access to publicly-funded research results. That is where both technology and contemporary culture are taking us. It is how we can maximise the value and impact generated by our excellent research base. As taxpayers put their money towards intellectual enquiry, they cannot be barred from then accessing it. They should not be kept outside with their noses pressed to the window – whilst, inside, the academic community produces research in an exclusive space. The Government believes that published research material which has been publicly financed should be publicly accessible – and that principle goes well beyond the academic community.

A short piece I wrote on my own time (IDRC is subject to Canadian government restrictions against any expenditures of Canadian funds in/for Myanmar) was just published in English in the Myanmar Times. I am hopeful the Bamar translation will also be published.

The text is below:

In 2010, I worked on a section of an ITU report about information and communication technologies in the least developed countries (ITU, 2011). Analyzing the countries that were at the bottom of the league tables in telecom, I found to my unhappiness that Burma was one before the last in mobile telephony. Hearing that N Korea was reaching 1 million active connections by end 2011, I checked the data again. Now Myanmar is last, other than for St Helena, a UK colony with a population of 5,000, which does not seem to have any mobiles.

Figure 1: Countries with lowest mobile SIMs/100 people,

Source: ITU/ICT Indicators Database, 2011.

It is not that N Korea has more mobiles than Myanmar, but that as a proportion of the population it is performing better, as a result of the rapid increase in connections driven by a foreign-owned private operator issued a license in 2008. Myanmar has had mobiles for longer, but according to data reported to the International Telecom Union by the government, the government-owned operator’s progress has been slow, compared to other low-performing countries that have not reformed their sectors.

Table 1: Total mobile connections and growth rates among the countries with lowest penetration

Source: ITU/ICT Indicators Database, 2011.
Notes: CAGR stands for Compound Annual Growth Rate, the best indicator of growth over time. The right-most column shows the percentage increase from 2009 to 2010.

There is no doubt that some of the data may not be accurate (whenever one sees numbers nicely rounded to thousands, one questions their veracity). It is the duty of the relevant country authorities to report the most current and accurate data to the ITU. In the case of Myanmar the 2009 number has been supplied by the Ministry of Posts and Telecom, while the 2010 number is an ITU estimate, which explains the round figure for 2010 and not for previous years. It would not be fair to use data from the Ministry only for Myanmar, but even if one tries, there are problems. The Ministry reports data by project not by aggregate connections; and the problems of rounded numbers persists.

But let us assume that there may be more mobiles in Myanmar than the ITU reports. Even then, it can, at most, overtake N. Korea and regain its old place at second (or third, counting St Helena) from the bottom. Is this something worth debating? The real challenge is to vault out of the Bottom Ten altogether, and give the people of Myanmar electronic connectivity on par with neighboring countries.

To achieve this goal, Myanmar has an advantage.

Late-starter advantage

Starting late means that most of the mistakes have been made, by others. In the world of policy design, we spend the most effort working around previous mistakes. For example, Thailand’s recent effort to develop its ICT sector has been bedeviled by the existence of concession contracts from a previous time. A green field is much easier to work with.

So, if the government wants to take Myanmar out of the Bottom Ten, what should it do? This is not the place for detail, but here are five key actions that must be taken at the outset:
• Build a national open-access fiber backbone as a Public Private Partnership
• Conduct an assessment of spectrum use and availability, especially for 3G and 4G technologies
• Initiate action to refarm or reassign frequencies if valuable frequencies have been assigned to low-value uses (it is most likely that the military are using frequencies across the spectrum)
• Design a technology-neutral access network license system
• Design and implement a clear market entry/exit policy modeled on Pakistan’s 2003 policies
In all these cases, the government should insist on solutions that are appropriate for developing country contexts and avoid the wholesale importation of policies developed and implemented in advanced market economies (Samarajiva & Zainudeen, 2008). International consultants will be required, but they should be carefully managed and coordinated so that the overall scheme is coherent and suits the local circumstances.

Managing the policy actions will require the establishment of a policy cell within a strong Ministry, preferably Finance and Planning. Most, if not all, of the present employees of Ministry of Posts and Telecom (14,770) should be moved into the national backhaul network PPP.

A sector specific regulatory authority will be needed. The first policy actions can be taken in parallel with the design and planning of the regulatory body.

Getting the architecture right

The green-field advantage will be lost if the overall architecture is not right, if the different policy actions do not cohere. For example, Timor Leste had green-field advantage, but wasted it by giving a long-term monopoly concession to Portugal Telecom. Today, Timor Leste is a telecom backwater, even if it is not in the Bottom Ten.

One way to get the basic elements of the architecture right is to learn from the experience of China’s engagement with the World Bank as it emerged from decades of closed-economy policies (Bottelier, 2006). Engaging with an entity such as the World Bank, rather than a specific country or company, opens up access to a range of lessons on telecom reforms: many successes, but some failures as well. The lessons are more important than the money.

I will illustrate with one failure and one success.

Since the late 1990s, the World Bank and its associated experts (e.g., Wellenius, 2000) promoted universal service funds as effective tools to bring the benefits of connectivity to the poor. At the time, this was an attractive solution and one that was superior to the previous practice of imposing universal service obligations on telecom operators. While significant benefits were gained, the instrument did not perform as well as expected, with more than USD 8 billion lying unspent in universal service accounts worldwide (Somasekhar, 2010).

The World Bank Independent Evaluation Group (2011, para 4.28), upon reviewing experience in multiple countries over five years, conceded that it failed to live up to the original promise:
Equity and integration of marginalized groups have been more effectively supported by Bank support for ICT policy and sector reform than by operations specifically designed to achieve these goals. ICT operations that supported reforms to introduce competition into the sector, when successful in supporting those reforms, have had significant impact, especially in access to cellular telephony services. This increase in overall access has had a spill-over effect of providing access to the underserved. Lower tariffs (especially in cellular telephony), falling handset prices, and the expansion of prepaid cellular services are all channels that facilitate access by the poor. One indicator of the poor becoming part of the customer base of cellular telephony providers is the monthly average revenue per user (ARPU), which declined from about $20 in 2002 to about $5 in 2010 in developing countries.
The success was in reforms to introduce competition to the telecom sector, as referred to above. Not only did these reforms bring the benefits of electronic connectivity to the poor, they paid back the costs of reforms many fold.

I was personally involved in managing aspects of telecom reforms for the government of Sri Lanka, funded by credits from the World Bank (Samarajiva, 2000, 2001; Samarajiva & Zainudeen, 2008). The total expenditures could not have exceeded USD 15-20 million. In 2010 alone, the government of Sri Lanka took in USD 122 million as revenues from the partially privatized telecom industry (Rajapaksa, 2011). Today, Sri Lanka is at the forefront of ICT developments in South Asia (behind only the Maldives in mobile connectivity), with almost universal access to voice telephony at some of the lowest prices in the world, and making good progress on broadband connectivity as well.

References
Bottelier, Pieter (2006). China and the World Bank: How a partnership was built. Stanford Center for International Development, Working Paper 277. http://www.stanford.edu/group/siepr/cgi-bin/siepr/?q=system/files/shared/pubs/papers/pdf/SCID277.pdf
ITU (2011). The role of ICT in advancing growth in least developed countries: Trends, challenges and opportunities. Geneva: ITU. http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ldc/turkey/docs/The_Role_of_ICT_in_Advancing_Growth_in_LDCs_Trends_Challenges_and_Opportunities.pdf ).
Laurence, Jeremy (2011, November 21). Secretive N. Korea opens up to cellphones, Reuters. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/21/uk-korea-north-cellphone-idUSLNE7AK01C20111121
Rajapaksa, Mahinda (2011, November 21). Fiscal management report 2012. http://www.treasury.gov.lk/depts/fpd/reports/fmr/2012/fmr2012-eng.pdf
Samarajiva, Rohan & Zainudeen, Ayesha (2008). ICT infrastructure in emerging Asia: Policy and regulatory roadblocks, New Delhi & Ottawa: Sage & IDRC. http://www.idrc.ca/en/ev-117916-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html
Samarajiva, Rohan (2000). The role of competition in institutional reform of telecommunications: Lessons from Sri Lanka, Telecommunications Policy, 24(8/9): 699-717. http://www.comunica.org/samarajiva.html
Samarajiva, Rohan (2001). Sri Lanka’s telecom revolution. OECD Observer (February 1). http://www.oecdobserver.org/news/fullstory.php/aid/487.html
Somasekhar, M. (2010). Pak ahead of India in use of Universal Service Funds, Hindu Businessline, http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/todays-paper/tp-info-tech/article991070.ece?ref=archive
Wellenius, Bjorn (2000). Extending Telecommunications beyond the market: Toward universal service in competitive environments. Public Policy Journal, Issue 206. http://rru.worldbank.org/PublicPolicyJournal/Summary.aspx?id=206
World Bank Independent Evaluation Group (2011). Capturing technology for development. http://ieg.worldbankgroup.org/content/ieg/en/home/reports/ict.html

The trend towards internet use for social networking in urban areas of the country is growing remarkably, keeping pace with the global trend, he said.

Almost 17 percent of the mobile phone subscribers use internet for social sites, which was less than one percent in 2007. Twelve percent use data services for e-mail, 12 percent for ringtones and 18 percent for various reasons, according to the study.

According to Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission, there are 3.11 crore people using internet, of which, 95 percent do it through mobile phones.

The study found that only 58 percent of urban mobile subscribers are aware of internet connectivity, while the figure is just 39 percent in rural areas.

After the rearrangement process, the quality of services of the mobile operators will be better than before with reduced call drops and more efficient network, said Abu Saeed Khan, secretary general of Association of Mobile Telecom Operators of Bangladesh (AMTOB).

Explaining the matter, Khan said, if you have three pieces of land in different places, you will have to make more boundaries to separate your lands from others. But when all the lands become a single piece, you will need fewer boundaries, leading to an increased area of your land.

Different operators use frequencies using different boundary lines called guard bands, Khan said. But after the rearrangement, the operators will need lesser guard bands that are unused parts of spectrum between bands for preventing interference.

Full report.