The slides are here.

Click here to view presentation slides. More information on the event is available here.

The full article can be downloaded here or read below:

Sri Lanka has completed the trial of a mobile phone project which helps early detection of communicable diseases. The ‘Real-time Bio-surveillance Programme’ allows data on patients and symptoms of illnesses to be sent directly from hospital wards to the epidemiological centre through a web interface installed on mobile phones.  Under the present manual system, set up in the 19th century, it can take more than two weeks for information of outbreaks to reach the epidemiological centre in the capital. As a result, officials first learn about the outbreak through the media. The mobile system allows quick analysis to identify disease patterns to be made before the outbreak spreads.

-FutureGov Asia Pacific, October 2010, p. 47

Asia Pacific telecom operators had a big party in Colombo this week. They were celebrating the 21 st anniversary of the global mobile standard, GSM. Despite a few puzzlingly sexist comments about the significance of the 21 st birthday to a “Young Girl” (as though it was not significant for a male) it was a good party.

Anyway, the point is that it was not just fun and games. The conference that followed was a serious one. In the industry leaders’ forum LIRNEasia was also given a place. I have been to many of these events, both at ITU Telecom when they used to be the preeminent industry gathering place and at other industry fora, and I have never seen anyone other than CEOs and government ministers or regulators invited for these kinds of headline sessions. I think industry is beginning to see the value of organizations such as LIRNEasia which bring evidence to bear on issues and allow for independent assessment of policy and regulatory actions.

Industry events can be, and are, used to stroke the egos of powerful government officials and build industry camaraderie. It is good that they are being used for more than that. Stroking egos is necessary when government officials hold so much discretionary power and the independence of regulatory agencies is a thin façade that only the ITU believes in. But it is important to try to get beyond this culture. After all, how can the telecom industry claim to be laying the foundation for a knowledge economy if it does not give weight to knowledge and evidence?

In addition to the Leader’s Forum, LIRNEasia organized a regulatory and policy session which had as participants Adam Denton (Head of Regulatory Affairs at the GSM Association), Samir Satchu (the Government and Regulatory Affairs head of Roshan, the heroic Afghan operator), M. Aslam Hayat (a regulatory expert from Pakistan) and Helani Galpaya of LIRNEasia. Helani’s and Aslam’s slides are worth taking a look at, providing new ideas on how to think about international roaming and license renewal among other matters.

The slides are here.

Aslam Hayat

Helani Galpaya

This is what ITU’s Telecommunication/ICT Indicators Report for the Asia-Pacific region 2008 says. It was released at ITU TELECOM ASIA 2008, Bangkok, Thailand yesterday (Sept 2, 2008).

The Report finds evidence that ICTs and broadband uptake foster growth and development, but the question remains as to the optimal speed that should be targeted in view of limited resources.

The area in which the region really stands out is the uptake of advanced Internet technologies, especially broadband Internet access. The Asia-Pacific region is the world’s largest broadband market with a 39 per cent share of the world’s total at the end of 2007. In terms of broadband access, Asia-Pacific has made remarkable progress in the past few years, with subscriber numbers growing almost five-fold in five years: from 27 million at the beginning of 2003 to 133 million at the start of 2008.

In the region’s high-income economies, ubiquitous access is progressing through a competitive race to provide ever faster fixed broadband access. Operators in Hong Kong (China) and Japan have launched one-Gigabits per second (Gbps) broadband and triple-play services aimed at the residential market, featuring applications such as Internet telephony and television. The Republic of Korea leads the world in terms of the percentage of households with fixed broadband access, and no less than five economies in the top ten are from Asia-Pacific. The Republic of Korea, Hong Kong (China), and Japan also lead the world in terms of the proportion of households with fibre optic connections, essential for supporting the next generation of ultra-high speed Internet applications.

These high-income economies are also leaders in terms of third generation (3G) mobile cellular deployment. Fixed and mobile broadband technologies complement each other and users enjoy continuous high-speed Internet access. In Singapore, a ubiquitous Internet access plan combining unlimited 8 Megabits per second (Mbps) fixed broadband, 2 Mbps mobile broadband and access at some 800 Wi-Fi hotspots is available for just USD 35 per month.

At the other extreme, in most of the region’s low and lower-middle income economies, high-speed Internet access is limited to urban areas at best, typically expensive, and often not available at all. The regional broadband divide is striking, with poor economies having a close-to-zero broadband penetration, compared to that of rich economies where one in four persons is a broadband subscriber (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Fixed broadband Internet subscribers per 100 inhabitants, 2007

The gap in available broadband speeds between rich and poor countries is as wide as broadband penetration. In Japan, the Republic of Korea and Hong Kong (China), the minimum advertised broadband speed is faster than the maximum broadband speed in Cambodia, Tonga, Laos and Bangladesh.

While in low and lower-middle income economies mobile phones have become a substitute for the shortage of fixed lines, they are not yet fulfilling the potential of broadband access. By the end of 2007, only Indonesia, the Maldives, the Philippines and Sri Lanka had commercially deployed WCDMA networks. The region’s two largest mobile markets, China and India, have yet to launch mobile broadband. By the end of 2007, there were over 120 million mobile broadband subscribers in the region (Figure 2), but almost all (97 per cent) were in high income economies.

Figure 2: Mobile cellular broadband subscribers in Asia-Pacific

While the region’s high-income economies are pushing the frontier of broadband bandwidth to a point where applications have yet to catch up, many Asia-Pacific developing economies are bandwidth starved, inhibiting the development of their information societies.

The ITU Report argues that broadband uptake enables a range of socially desirable and valuable online services in areas such as government, education and health. The use of broadband technologies can help overcome many of the basic development challenges faced by poor countries. The Report provides a number of examples where broadband connectivity has acted as a catalyst for development. These include the provision of education through distance learning in the Solomon Islands, the creation of jobs through business incubators for women in China, and the supply of communication services for disaster management in Myanmar.

Read the press release here. Full report is not yet available in the public domain.

(Please click on the images for a better view)

Asia’s emerging markets, comprising eight nations, are expected to see mobile subscriber net gains of 573 million by end-2012, breaching the one billion mark to close the year at an estimated 1.06 billion subscribers, a report from research firm Frost & Sullivan said.

In 2007, these emerging markets were home to some 487 million mobile users, accounting for 37.1% of Asia-Pacific’s total mobile subscriber base, the report said.

The report also said the mobile services sector in eight emerging Asia-Pac countries (excluding China) earned revenues of $33.27 billion in 2007. This is predicted to reach $61.35 billion by end-2013, at a CAGR of 10.7% (2007-2013).

Countries included in this study are Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Laos, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Vietnam; all with mobile penetration rates of under 50%.

According to Frost & Sullivan industry analyst Jeff Teh, over half of the world’s mobile networks are believed to exist in emerging markets.

“Most mature markets in Europe, the Americas and even Asia are fast reaching saturation, adding fewer connections and offering fewer growth opportunities. As mobile operators in Asia scramble to add another staggering one billion subscribers onto their networks, Asia’s emerging nations offer the most palpable growth prospects, particularly in the rural sectors,” Teh said.

He adds that such opportunities are however not without a gamble “the inherent characteristics across these emerging markets are that they are generally lower-income hence low ARPU segments, with blended ARPU as low as $3.90 per month in some countries, and subscribers are largely inclined towards prepaid services.

In South Asia Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) scored highest (80%) but Telecommunication Regulatory Commission of India (TRAI) was not too behind (75%). PTA site which scored highest marks in the previous survey in 2005 this time lost marks due to the lack of some features like the non availability of local language version. 

More information in paper format and Presentation Slides

Rohan Samarajiva

Government is about the sustenance of hope. Yet in too many places, government is about killing hope: “you can’t make it because you’re poor/ your ethnicity is wrong / you aren’t from the right school.” When hope is dead, when the pie looks like it’s not expanding, and the game is zero-sum, the path that remains is hatred.

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) shake things up. Not necessarily for the better; but with prodding of the right kind and possibly some luck and happenstance, the equilibrium can be broken in a positive way. So, I work with ICTs, not as ends but as means. Opportunity anywhere rests on connectivity: the ability to obtain credit/capital/knowledge/a job; and so on. Those who already have connectivity, and, thereby, access to various forms of supportive networks have more opportunity and, therefore, have more hope.

Young people in the villages of Sri Lanka (and possibly other countries) have a strong sense of being cut off from opportunity and, in many cases, see little hope. With ICTs, I see the possibility of changing that sense of exclusion; not necessarily of leveling the playing field, but giving them a fighting chance. Because I know the limitations of government, both from studying it and being in it, I have little faith in centralized solutions, except perhaps with regard to war and peace and big infrastructure (but highly qualified, even in these cases). I therefore tend to think less in terms of specific ICT4D products and services and more in terms of creating the conditions for decentralized actors innovating with ICTs.
This leads to a focus on infrastructure, primarily the hard infrastructure necessary to move bits around effectively and at low cost. Even here, I think the need is to create the conditions for more actors to get involved, not rely on monolithic suppliers.

With ICT infrastructure, one has no alternative but to deal with policy and regulation. So I work in multiple ways to reform policy and regulation affecting ICT infrastructure:

• When invited, I work inside government (Samarajiva, 2000; 2004);

• At other times, I contribute as a public intellectual; and

• Since 2004, I have been working on creating the conditions for more public intellectuals to contribute to reform of ICT infrastructure in the Asia Pacific through LIRNEasia (www.lirneasia.net), a new organization supported primarily by the International Development Research Centre of Canada (2006).

I believe that the innovative work being undertaken by LIRNEasia researchers across the region will create a greater appreciation of the value of decentralized decision making with regard to ICTs; as well as more effective engagement with the policy and regulatory processes. The results we have seen in a short time (http://www.regulateonline.org/content/view/810/40/) suggest that we will be able to demonstrate the efficacy of policy-relevant research and capacity building with concrete evidence.

Dramatic drops in the price of international capacity as a result of market deregulation in the Asia Pacific is resulting in a shift in the dynamics of Internet traffic, according to a presentation at the APRICOT conference in Taipei this week. Read more.

Courtesy of Nuwan on the humanitarian-ict mailing list, I just watched “The Long Last Mile” on YouTube. Produced by Television for Education – Asia Pacific, it describes the project by LIRNEasia to evaluate Last-Mile Hazard Information Dissemination. Some useful points in an accessible format – redundancy in communication technologies, identification of key responders, community engagement in the process, the importance of simulation exercises for learning, and so on. Only 12 minutes long, it’s definitely worth watching. Plus, YouTube! Web2.0! Etc, etc.

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Airwaves, Web Power at Auction – New York Times

The radio spectrum licenses, which are to be returned from television broadcasters as they complete their conversion from analog to digital signals in February 2009, are as coveted as oil reserves are to energy companies. They will provide the winners with access to some of the best remaining spectrum — enabling them to send signals farther from a cell tower with far less power, through dense walls in cities, and over wider territories in rural areas that are now underserved.

Nearly 1.5 trillion mobile messages were sent in the Asia-Pacific region over the past 12 months, accounting for 78.9 per cent of all SMS traffic globally last year, said a Gartner’s report.

Nearly 2.3 trillion SMS messages are expected to be transmitted in 2008, a 19.6 per cent increase from the 2007 figure.

The usage of text and picture messaging is also forecast to increase across Asia, Gartner said, but growth rates are likely to slow down as the mobile market becomes increasingly saturated.

Read the full story in ‘The Age’ here

Two publications, with chapters by LIRNEasia researcher Chanuka Wattegama, were launched during the GK3, third global Knowledge conferences held in Kuala Lumpur in December, 2007.

The biennial Digital Review of Asia Pacific is a comprehensive guide to the state-of-practice and trends in information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) in Asia Pacific. The third edition (2007/2008) covers 31 countries and economies, including North Korea for the first time. Each country chapter presents key ICT policies, applications and initiatives for national development. In addition, five thematic chapters provide a synthesis of some of the key issues in ICT4D in the region, including mobile and wireless technologies, risk communication, intellectual property regimes and localization.

Communicating Disasters: An Asia Pacific Resource Book,  co-published by TVE Asia Pacific and the UNDP, brings together 21 authors – most of them from Asia – who share their experiences and insights on effective communication before, during and after disasters. Coming out in time for the third anniversary of the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004, it takes stock of communication lessons of the mega-disaster. Its core message: adequate planning can help avoid communications disasters when communicating about disasters. Edited by two leading Asian journalists – Nalaka Gunawardene and Frederick Noronha – the book carries a foreword by Sir Arthur C Clarke.

Ottawa opens up wireless industry to more competition

The Conservative government on Wednesday paved the way for new cellphone companies by announcing new rules for an auction of radio airwaves designed to spur competition in the wireless industry.

About 40 per cent of the spectrum will be reserved for new entrants, with the remainder open to all bidders, including Canada’s big three providers — Rogers, Bell and Telus. The government will also mandate roaming agreements, which will force existing carriers to share their networks with newcomers for five years, plus another five if the new entrants can build up their own networks nationally. If a new carrier is unable to reach a “reasonable” roaming agreement with an existing provider, an outside arbitrator will be brought in, Industry Canada said.

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Portico Research says global mobile penetration rate will be at 75 per cent by 2011. 

It is now believed that some 65 per cent of these “new-to-the-world” users will come from the Asia Pacific region, rather than from Africa as has previously been though most likely, with the majority being from rural regions in countries such as India and Pakistan. 

Portico also says that although sector growth in the mature and supersaturated markets like Europe will remain limited, the US is a different case and that, if managed properly, the nation could experience five years of sustained high-value volume growth.

Portico cites a monthly ARPU in countries such as India and Bangladesh at about US$3 to $4 and points out that the average European and US subscriber thus pays the equivalent of the annual ARPU of an Indian mobile subscriber in a single month or even less. Read more.