Two years back China Mobile bought Paktel for US$460 million. That was a legitimate transaction.

Last week two Chinese nationals were arrested while the authorities busted a bypass den at Islamabad. They have been allegedly the partner of an “influential Pakistani” in this illegal venture. It claims to have caused an estimated six billion rupees (US$74 million) loss to the exchequer. The news followed by a lively debate is going on.

Meanwhile, the Internet Service Providers Association of Pakistan (ISPAK) has rejected a regulatory decree to deploy necessary countermeasures to block the VoIP traffic. Their argument and a loud debate can be viewed here

Some governments shut down telecom networks including the Internet to control dissent. Others do not. What are the conditions that give rise to the former action? Why do others not do this? Israel never shuts down telecom networks but Sri Lanka does. Why?

And yet the Twittering goes on. As states such as Iran crack down on online speech and organizing, clever netizens find ways around the controls. In Iran as well as in China, Burma and parts of the former Soviet Union, there’s an on-again, off-again process of citizens speaking out and states pushing back.

Of course, governments always have the nuclear option when it comes to the Internet: They can shut it down and keep it down. It’s what Burma did when monks took…

To many people’s surprise, the UK has decided to tax every fixed line 6 pounds a year to build “next generation broadband” throughout the country.

But Virgin’s network is limited and fibre-optic cables are expensive. The two firms can profitably reach only around two-thirds of the population, reckons Matt Yardley of Analysys Mason, a consultancy that helped to prepare the report. Connecting the rest at high speed will cost around £3 billion. So Lord Carter surprised the broadband industry by proposing a £6 annual tax on telephone lines, raising around £150m. That will be used to bring “next generation broadband” (a term left undefined, but probably an expansion of the BT scheme) by 2017 to the third of the country the private sector will struggle…

Good news for the many outside and inside government who struggled to get this done, including our colleagues from Research ICT Africa. The necessary condition for cheap connectivity is about to the fulfilled.

Last week, in the Kenyan port of Mombasa, a regional communications revolution belatedly got under way when Kenya’s president, Mwai Kibaki, plugged in the first of three fibre-optic submarine cables due to make landfall in Kenya in the next few months. They should speed up the connection of Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda, as well as bits of Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan, to the online world.

Of course, as the West African cable showed abundantly, and then the landing of SEA-ME-WE 4 in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh did, the cable by itself does not…

It’s not only in Finland and India that they are returning fixed line connections . . . .

At the University of Washington, the communications department faculty did away with their landlines. (“Phones were our biggest line item,” said David Domke, the department chairman. “We’ve still got landlines in common areas and for staff, but we’re saving about $1,100 a month by getting rid of faculty phones.”)

Story. And the punchline:

“We found a way of saving money that doesn’t hurt the student experience, and I think everybody’s happy,” said Mr. Domke of the University of Washington. “With cellphones and e-mail, everyone can get hold of us. People think it’s funny that we’re the communications department and we cut phones. But it’s just a symbol, an old technology.”

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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 seven percent. However, the end result was unexpected, though it could have been predicted from economic theory. In the two quarters after the tax increase, the tax revenue from mobile declined.

How was the telecom market affected? In the same report, a figure shows how the subscriber base increased over time. However, the rate of growth declined in recent quarters. In 2007, the rate of growth was 9.9 percent; 2008 ended with a minus 0.3 percent growth.…

Payal Malik, Senior Research Fellow, will speak on universal service policies based on LIRNEasia research to the participants of the 3rd Annual Connecting Rural Communities Asia Forum to be held from 23-25 June 2009 in New Delhi, India. The event is expected to attract stakeholders, policy makers and executives from across the ICT sector with the shared goal of shaping future of rural connectivity.

The organizers hope to be discuss:

• How can governments best support the creation of self-sustaining rural connectivity initiatives that benefit local people?
• Step-by-step practical guidance on overcoming the most pressing technical challenges
• Developing a world-class telecentre rural development programme
• Progress on delivering the promise of the United Services Obligation Fund
• Realising the benefits of greater rural connectivity though the delivery of E-services
• Mapping the future need for connectivity: Identifying choke points…

CB [cell broadcasting] is an intrinsic feature of GSM, UMTS and IS 95 CDMA networks, and is thus available in the two Maldivian networks. But it must be activated. Most handsets are capable of receiving CB messages but the feature must be turned on. However, in the early stages, getting customers to turn on the feature could be an effective way of educating them of mobile-based public warning.

Following stakeholder meetings that included sharing of information on the ongoing CB channel-standardization work of Study Group 2 of the Telecommunication Bureau of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T) and experience in attempting to use CB for public warning in Sri Lanka, the recommendations to TAM are being finalized. They include the constitution of a “trust protocol board”…

A clinic on Communication for Policy Impact was conducted by Dr. Rohan Samarajiva, Helani Galpaya and Nilusha Kapugama of LIRNEasia at the recently concluded IDRC PAN-All conference in Penang, Malaysia. The necessity of communicating or disseminating good research results to stakeholders such as the policymakers, private sector and media was one of the underlying themes of the conference.

The clinic focused on giving participants the necessary tools to formulate a communications strategy for a given project. Some of the key aspects identified were:

• identification of relevant audience/s and appropriate method/s of communication,
• importance of story telling
• timing of the release of results
• recognition of policy windows

The importance of developing a communications strategy at the proposal stage of the project was highlighted. However, such strategies would need to be updated in keeping…

Dr. Gordon Gow presented the working paper titled; The future of community-based hazard information systems: Insights from the Internet sharing economy.

Dr. Gow who was previously at the LSE is now an Associate Professor at University of Alberta.

The presentation began by looking at situations where systems/programmes are developed but only to fall to disuse. The focus will be on the last-mile. The presentation looks at the long term viability of a system. Financial resources are eimportant. The need to tap everyday communicative acts was also highlighted. The need to move beyond a narrow scope of early warning. As investment in last mile systems fall, the vulnerability increases. The cycle continues. The need for more moderate investment was stressed.

If the vulnearbilities of the local communities are reduced then…

Twitter postpones scheduled maintenance to keep service available for Iranian users. Journalists request video on twitter and get deluged with responses.

The BBC’s Persian-language television channel said that for a time on Tuesday, it was receiving about five videos a minute from amateurs, even though the channel is largely blocked within Iran. One showed pro-government militia members firing weapons at a rally.

“We’ve been struck by the amount of video and eyewitness testimony,” said Jon Williams, the BBC world news editor. “The days when regimes can control the flow of information are over.”

What does this say about the ability of governments to block info? If the mobile networks and the Internet are shut down, what will happen? What are the costs to government?

Full story.

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Today (16th June 2009) if you were to google “great mobile debate” you will only see references to one held as part of the Forum Oxford Future Technologies Conference 2008. But if the people who ran and attended the IDRC PANall conference in Penang last week are as netsavvy as I think they are, you are likely to see Great Mobile Debate of Penang supplanting the Oxford debate in google searches.

The proposition won. I was the proponent, so not entirely unbiased, but it did, as evidenced by the cheering and the congratulations that followed. Given this was a topic that fully resonated with LIRNEasia’s 2008-10 research program, it was understandable that we won. The slides that were used are here.

In the opening statement, I showed that…

Since Rheingold wrote of Smart Mobs, activists have been atwitter about the potential of mobile phones and texting to effect democratic change. The ongoing struggle against the theocratic dictatorship in Iran has given many examples. But it also shows the limits. When the government shuts down the SMS system, or indeed the whole network, what happens to mobile based organizing? What are the conditions for the government not shutting down networks?

The silent march was a deliberate and striking contrast to the chaos of the past few days, when riot police officers sprayed tear gas and wielded clubs to disperse scattered bands of angry and frightened young people. When the occasional shout or chant went up, the crowd quickly hushed it, and some held up…

US universal policy is one of the worst in the world. Highly inefficient. Favoring fixed phones. And so on. It now appears that one of its many flaws is being remedied.

John Cobb, 59, a former commercial fisherman who is disabled with cirrhosis of the liver and emphysema, lives in a studio apartment in Greensboro, N.C., on a fixed monthly income of $674. He has been hoping to receive more government assistance, and in February, he did.

It came in the form of a free cellphone and free service.

Mr. Cobb became one of a small but rapidly growing number of low-income Americans benefiting from a new wrinkle to a decades-old federal law that provided them with subsidized landline telephone service.

Full article.

An article published in the Himal Southasian and authored by Rohan Samarajiva, explores the feasibility of regional economic integration among the SAARC region, given among factors, high telecommunication costs between such countries. Entitled, ‘Roaming dystopia’, the article opines that in the same way that poor transportation facilities can stifle international trade between countries, so can high communication costs such as leased line prices act as a deterrent to effective economic integration.

Based on roaming tariffs collated and published in LIRNEasia’s International Voice Benchmarks report, the article states that “unless telephone calls within the region are cheaper than calls to locations outside, it is reasonable to dismiss declarations on economic integration as little more than hot air”.

The full article is available here: Part 1 | Part 2| Part 3

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