The Chinese government on Wednesday began to require cellphone users to furnish identification when buying SIM cards, a move officials cast as an effort to rein in burgeoning cellphone spam, pornography and fraud schemes.

The requirement, which has been in the works for years, is not unlike rules in many developed nations that ask users to present credit card data or other proof of identification to buy cellphone numbers. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said that about 40 percent of China’s 800 million cellphone users were currently unidentified. Those users will be ordered to furnish identification by 2013 or lose their service, according to The Global Times, a state-run newspaper.

But that aside, this is very good news. I hope SLT will offer decent leased line prices to Jaffna and that some entrepreneur will quickly move to set up BPO operations in the peninsula. Our friend Muttukrishna Sarvananthan is talking up building a knowledge economy in the North. One precondition has been satisfied.

Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT) has commissioned a fibre optic cable linking the former war zone in the northern Jaffna peninsula with the rest of the country, offering high-speed communications, a statement said.
The “information superhighway” to the north has been built alongside the A9 main route to Jaffna, where information technology and business process outsourcing ventures are being promoted to provide jobs for youth after the war.

SLT said its expanded fibre optic information system will improve customer access to high performance broadband, helping business expand and enabling all telecommunications operators to expand their operations bringing new facilities to the north.

The new cable has the capacity to meet all future requirements of the Northern Peninsula, it said.

Sri Lanka Telecom began the project after the end of the island’s 30-year ethnic war, fought largely in the north and east, in May 2009.

Details of the event here.

Click here to view presentation.

Voice calls will be “free” in the future. The quotation marks signify that nothing is really free. In the natural evolution of the industry, there will come a time when customers will pay for connectivity in various forms, either by data volumes or time. Voice will simply be one among many applications they can use as part of this connectivity bundle.

I didn’t think the future would come so soon.

So I was asked by a reporter what I thought about (a) the impact of the Google offer of free calls on the telecom operators and (b) it being banned.

I said to (b) that they’d be mad. There is no practical way to ban this other than prevent us from using Google. And that would be mad.

I also pointed out the futility of such actions. That is a futile attempt to safeguard their misbegotten exclusivity SLT and TRC actually put people in jail in 2000-01. Not much good it did them.

But more interesting is the answer that was generated by question (a). I said that this was a golden opportunity to market broadband and netbooks. The value proposition of broadband has always been clear to knowledge workers; those who look up words, write blogs, etc. The value of the Internet and broadband connectivity has been less clear for those who are not into book learning. Porn, maybe.

But now, wow. Here’s the reason to buy a netbook for everyone with family abroad. If I was a teleco, I’d be pushing netbooks and dongles hard, from now, to new demographic segments.

I’d also be ramping up making more applications available for those with netbooks and smart phones. All this time there weren’t enough potential buyers, defined by people with connectivity. Now with voice as the driver there will be.

And money is money. Whether it comes as revenue from international calls or whether it comes as broadband revenue or revenue share from applications.

As part of our annual international voice and broadband price benchmarking reports (Indicators continued) we have decided to include ILC prices for selected countries within the region (Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, Philippines and Indonesia). The first step was to compare available ILC benchmarking methodologies and use this comparison study as a base to create our own. The lack of freely available information on the same (Sources explored were OECD, ITU, APCC and TeleGeography), prompted us to define a methodology irrespective to what may be available elsewhere.

What we’d like to compare are leased line prices for given speeds (E1: 2Mbps, DS-3: 45 Mbps or STM-1: 155Mbps, where applicable) from the cities LIRNEasia works in, to cities around the world based on traffic flow – another data set that is not freely available.

When calculating the IPL cost we plan on adhering to the following:

- Non-recurring charges such as equipment and installation fees shall not be reported.
- Only annual full-circuit rental fees shall be included (in rare instances when prices are reported based on half circuits, a suitable multiplier will be used in order to benchmark against other full circuit prices)
- Local loop circuits will be excluded (because prices may vary based on within a city)
- Prices will be be reported in US$, excluding taxes

We would appreciate any information you may have on ILC methodologies, traffic flow data (especially to and from the countries below) and any other suggestions in defining the methodology. All comments will be valued.

Google entered a new business beyond Internet search on Wednesday with a service within Gmail to make phone calls over the Web to landlines or cellphones.

The service will thrust Google into direct competition with Skype, the Internet telephone company, and with telecommunications providers. It could also make Google a more ubiquitous part of people’s social interactions by uniting the service for phone calls with e-mail, text messages and video chats.

“It’s one place where you can get in touch with the people that you care about, and how that happens from a network perspective is less important,” said Charles S. Golvin, a telecommunications analyst at Forrester Research.

Gmail has offered voice and video chat for two years, but both parties must be at their computers. Google said the new service would work well for people in a spot with poor cellphone reception or for those making a quick call from their desk.

The presentation is likely to be useful for anyone wanting a quick and comprehensive overview of the literature. It uses the work being done at LIRNEasia on the delivery of government services with IDRC support as an exemplar and is possibly the first publication of some of the findings of her research on self-organizing networks that are emerging among Sri Lankan local government authorities.

Even mothballed Myanmar is coming along, albeit slowly. Until recently, its military rulers did not permit pre-paid mobile services on its network. Obtaining a local SIM card meant shelling out at least $1,500, assuming you had the right connections. No mobile roaming was allowed. Recently, however, the government began selling pre-paid cards to anyone with $20 to spare. Alas, the numbers cannot be topped up and expire after a month. It seems that the generals understand as little about building customer loyalty as they do about earning the political sort.

I am trying hard to figure out what went through the mind of the person who designed this scheme. Perhaps he was trying to increase the SIMs/100 for Myanmar.

WHILE much of the world is still rolling out the third generation (3G) of mobile networks, some countries have already moved on to the fourth (4G). Russia offers an intriguing example. Yota, a start-up with no old voice business to protect, has built a 4G network from scratch, burying 3,000km (1,864 miles) of fibre-optic cables to connect its wireless base stations. The firm is ambitious: it hopes to establish a global brand. That would be a rarity for Russia.

It will indeed to interesting to compare 4G only versus 4G on top of legacy networks.

The objectives of the study are:

Harsha – When we do research, not all of our innovations will be implemented. Main reason is the transaction cost of disseminating knowledge. So we are trying to see how we can use ICTs to reduce the cost.

What is LIRNEasia’s interest?

• More value addition by the poor (including small businesses). i.e. less involved in producing commoditized products and able to get a higher share of the revenues (e.g. like Amulor MahaGrapesin, India). This means understanding how the poor (including small businesses) can
  • Reduce barriers to entry –i.e. make value chains more inclusive
  • Use more knowledge in their activities – i.e. make value chains more efficient
  • Reduce transaction costs’
  • What role can ICTs and related infrastructures play
  • What role can the private sector play in providing Access more services (including ICTs) targeting their needs – i.e. niches where private sector can play a role

Mr. Gunawardena – are we looking at how ICTs can be used for expanding markets?

Harsha – Yes. We have already done that through GGS-Dialog’s TradeNet service.

We can visualize this taking the case of MahaGrapes in India. MG is an exporter of grapes. The value chain actors consists of MG, grape cooperatives and grape farmers. MG and cooperatives charge only the cost doing the service. The majority of the revenues and profits goes down to the farmer. The government provided funding for this start-up. However, they have since been managing on their own.

Rohan – you find this model in South Africa such as KWD (wine industry). It was previously government-owned but now it is privatised. We need to see which type of model is better.

Erasha – are we looking at all SMEs or only a few sectors?

Sriganesh – Only tea and processed fruits and vegetables, but nothing is cast in stone yet.

Harsha – branding and certification costs money. The benefits of that need to be passed down to the smaller guys.

Rohan – we need to look at competition law when considering such ventures.

Rohan – you can have a situation where the cooperatives can begin to extract more money, farmers complain and  the system can disintegrate.

Harsha – rents are not distributed equitably due to the power structures.

Mr. Gunawardena – there can be situations where seeds can be in short supply, particularly in Monaragela, Sri Lanka.

Harsha – we asked farmers how much time and money goes on deciding a crop? Answer – whether seeds are available, how much it yields, etc. But networks are isolated. Info via mobile phones can solve this issue.

Mr. Gunawardena – some farmers are encouraged to diversify the crops they are producing, e.g. tea and horticulture

Timeline – analyse two value chains between sep – dec 2010. present findings in Jan 2011. Analyse value chains in India, Bangladesh and Thailand between Feb – May 2011. Develop SME questionnaire after that, drawing on findings from the value-chain work.

Value-chain approach

Multiple agencies have already done work in refining the value chain approach

USAID, DFID, GTZ, ILO, FAO, World Bank, IDRC

Our approach:

No reinventing of the wheel: we utilize learnings from others

Pay closer attention to:

• The poor and MSEs/ SMEs, i.e. making value chains more inclusive

• Increasing use of knowledge, i.e. making value chains more efficient

  Reducing transaction costs for the poor and MSEs/ SMEs

• Identifying how ICTs (and related infrastructures) can play a role
• Identifying areas for private provision of needed services

Questions to keep in mind

Knowing Abu, we are confident that he will use this prestigious position to steer Bangladesh away from unproductive confrontations of the type we have seen over the past years, to one where the mobile operators who have done the heavy lifting in getting the people of Bangladesh connected electronically will also be allowed to play their due role in the government’s plans to reach middle-income status by 2021 (the fiftieth anniversary of the republic) through actions such as the implementation of Digital Bangladesh.

AMTOB is an industry body and he will have to represent the industry. But we are confident that one can represent an industry and also serve the public interest, especially in the context of a rapidly expanding pie. Abu has repeatedly demonstrated his public spiritedness, including through his unsung contributions to getting his country connected to an undersea cable. He will continue, we are sure.

LIRNEasia has been both blessed and cursed with regard to the people who work with it. Blessed because their skills and abilities are recognized and rewarded and cursed because then we get less of their time and attention. Harsha Vardhana Singh who started working with us on a research project on backbones, got recruited as the Deputy Director General of the WTO. Divakar Goswami got headhunted by Deloittes; Lorraine Salazar by McKinsey; the list goes on.

Now Abu Saeed.

But we have been told he’s not abandoning us altogether. Like Harsha de Silva, he will try to work with us as time and conditions permit. As with Harsha, we will navigate the shoals, maintaining the relationship but also ensuring that conflicts of interest are avoided through open communication.

We wish our friend Abu Saeed Khan and AMTOB well. We will support you in your efforts to advance your country and serve the people at the bottom of the pyramid.

So I was more than a little surprised to receive an invitation for a live talk show during drive time from the government channel. I accepted, mostly out of curiosity as to why I had ceased to be persona non grata. I was even more surprised when I found the show was sponsored by the ICT Agency and that my introduction mentioned my role in setting up the agency. The moderator was well prepared and even tried to set up controversy by playing a segment from a previous show where a post modernist had said that I have no understanding of the cultural aspects of ICTs.

What I was most surprised by was the fact that they let through a caller who wanted me to make a critical evaluation of the progress made by e Sri Lanka since 2003, or the lack thereof.

I responded saying that good things had been done, but that more should be done. That the 1919 government information center that they kept advertising through the show was a great innovation, but that it did not attract enough calls and give enough information. That Sri Lanka had made absolute progress on the composite indices such as the ICT Development Index, but that we were falling behind in relative terms because others were running harder. The usual things that I say.

That is what I have to say to ICTA about the commendable effort to spark public discourse about ICTs and their social, economic and cultural effects. You’re doing good work, but you can do much better.

Good that you invite people like me and the postmodernist, both people who speak their minds. But surely, you can do better in terms of media channels. I do not know the exact ratings position of the government channel, but I suspect it is not the channel of choice in public transport during drive time. If you want to communicate, you need to use the channels that have large audiences. You need to go outside the frame of government money being given to other government agencies, to getting the most bang for the buck.

“Attention is the holy grail,” Mr. Strayer says.

“Everything that you’re conscious of, everything you let in, everything you remember and you forget, depends on it.”

Echoing other researchers, Mr. Strayer says that understanding how attention works could help in the treatment of a host of maladies, like attention deficit disorder, schizophrenia and depression. And he says that on a day-to-day basis, too much digital stimulation can “take people who would be functioning O.K. and put them in a range where they’re not psychologically healthy.”

The quest to understand the impact on the brain of heavy technology use — at a time when such use is exploding — is still in its early stages. To Mr. Strayer, it is no less significant than when scientists investigated the effects of consuming too much meat or alcohol.

Pettegree writes well and amasses information superbly. He refrains from explicitly comparing the technology of print, and its historical impact, with the technology of the Internet. Implicit similarities include issues of intellectual property and privacy, of power, of libel, as well as a general challenge to old modes — the proliferation of personal expression, the contentiousness, the question of how to capitalize, and capitalize upon, a new medium.

This scholarly restraint, leaving his readers to compare and contrast, seems wise. And there are certainly contrasts with the modern age. Describing the immensely popular verse romances like “Orlando Furioso,” for example, Pettegree shows that in the Renaissance these works were not read in the prolonged, silent trance experienced by readers of Dickens or Flaubert. Modern readers recognize the quiet, lone hours spent by Henry James’s character Isabel Archer, that immersive reading experienced not only by devotees of James but by escapist fans of the genre known as “airport books.” In contrast to this industrial-age solitude of print narrative, the 16th-century verse romances and other episodic books like “The Decameron” were suited for reading aloud — enjoyed in a communal, social setting.

In an appended “Note on Sources,” Pettegree allows himself to acknowledge that, “Ironically, it has been the next great information revolution — the Internet — that has allowed this work on the first age of print to be pursued to a successful conclusion.” Digital information newly available from all over the world enhanced his research on early print culture — in all its frequently vulgar, ephemeral, zany and menacing variety.

In our most recent demand-side ICT study, Teleuse@BOP3, we asked bottom of the pyramid (BOP) phone owners if and how often they used their phone (mobile or fixed) for business purposes or any other financial or work-related purposes. The responses we got were quite encouraging:

Teleuse@BOP4 is almost underway. This time, we have decided to seek out the wisdom of the crowds in designing and fine-tuning some of the questions that we ask in Teleuse@BOP4.

Responses to the question of business use of phones are important in this research cycle, where we are trying to understand , inter alia, what services (including telecom) would better equip SMEs (many of which are owned by or employ people at the BOP) to participate in the knowledge based economy.

Similarly as important are the reasons that prevent greater use of phones for these purposes (trust, alternatives, cost, culture, etc). Here is a draft question to seek out this information; we invite comments, suggestions and feedback on how this question can be improved.

“Q: What prevents you from using the phone for these purposes (business, financial or work related) at all/more than you do currently?

a. It is more convenient communicating on these issues face-to-face than over the phone

b. I am not sure if I can trust the other party when talking about these things over the phone

c. Other people prefer to talk face-to-face

d. I don’t engage in such  activities

e. other”