You stood in a line, staff would come up to the line with handheld devices to serve customers with minor needs such as a sheet of stamps, shortening the line for people with complex problems that had to be dealt with at the counter. They started selling wrapping paper and tape and creating spaces for people to wrap gifts according to USPS rules. And it made a difference; USPS started making money.

This gave me hope that government-owned monopolies could be turned around. I knew one terrible weakness in their business model: the reliance on transporting junk mail (flyers, coupons, catalogs). I knew this could not last. But I thought, wrongly it appears, that the business of carrying goods purchased through e commerce would keep them afloat. Letters would go the way of the dodo, but the USPS would make a good living off parcels, I thought.

It is hard to think of a better deal than mailing a letter. In exchange for nothing more than a first-class stamp, the U.S. Postal Service will come to your house, pick up your envelope, and deliver it anywhere in the country. It will bring it from Hawaii to Miami. It will carry it from Bangor, Maine, to Dededo, Guam, a distance of 8,000 miles. If you got the address wrong, it will bring the letter back. These services are completed with extraordinary accuracy and speed. The cost? A mere 44 cents, less if you bought your forever stamps years ago.

America’s postal service is elegant, efficient, even amazing, given the enormous size of the country and the low cost of stamps. But the U.S. Postal Service is a hulking, foundering, money-hemorrhaging bureaucracy. A government watchdog has deemed the whole business unsustainable. Next month, it might actually run out of cash. It raises the question: How is the postal service going to be viable as mailed letters become increasingly obsolete?

And more, in a less-than-inspired (note the retrograde fixation on letters) piece of writing in Slate.

The US is the US. They can solve their own problems. Developing countries need a reliable mode of delivering packages if markets are to be made more efficient and the horrendous pressures on the roads eased. In a recent research project led by Ayesha Zainudeen, we recommended that the postal services be developed as reliable means of delivering items purchased on m commerce platforms, and also pointed to potential that the VPP service had for solving some of the trust problems bedeviling m commerce.

Even if these m commerce dreams were not realizable, one cannot not reform the postal services in our countries. They are not delivering acceptable service and they are hemorrhaging tax payer money. People are adjusting and finding workarounds. If the government waits too long, the workarounds will be norm, and there will be no alternative but to bury the dysfunctional postal service.

The two-and-a-half day workshop brought together experts from mobile manufacturers, research, digital technology, service providers, donors, non-profit organizations, and policymakers to brainstorm on how mobiles could be effectively used for improving social development in India.

Click here to view her presentation. The conference agenda can be viewed here.

LIRNEasia Senior Research Manager, Ayesha Zainudeen, was selected to review the paper; her written assessment is available here.

An excerpt of the executive summary of the paper follows:

What is clear from the Research ICT Africa (RIA) Household and Individual Access and Usage Survey is that the diffusion of ICT is highly uneven concentrating in urban areas and leaving some rural areas almost untouched. Access to these technologies is constrained by income as is usage, and as they become more complex, they are increasingly constrained by literacy and education. This analysis explores the inequities of access and usage further, by viewing them through a gender lens.

Of the limited demand-side data on Africa that exists, very little is disaggregated on gender lines. This study provides a descriptive statistical overview of access to ICTs by women and men and their usage of them. This is supported by focus groups that were undertaken in five of the 17 countries surveyed in East, Central, South and West Africa.

Harsha De Silva speaking on ‘mPayments in Public Transport’. The session was chaired by Yaseen Anwar, Deputy Governor, State Bank of Pakistan

___________________________________________________

Mobile 2.0 describes the next wave of applications and services – the use of mobiles for more than voice. On the 26^th and 27^th of April 2010, LIRNEasia together with the PTA co-hosted a successful expert forum in Islamabad, Pakistan. A multitude of themes were discussed over the four sessions, when the experts presented their research and cases to an audience that consisted of those representing regulators, mobile operators, government agencies and the media from nine countries of the Asia Pacific region.

Day 1: Opening Session

Welcome Speech I: Prof. Rohan Samarajiva, PhD, Chair and CEO, LIRNEasia

Welcome Speech II: Rashid Khan, CEO, Mobilink

Address by Chief Guest: Sardar Muhammad Latif Khan Khosa, Advisor to Prime Minister on IT

Day 2: Expert Forum

Session 1: Beyond voice (Easing payments, making markets efficient)

Chair: Yaseen Anwar, Deputy Governor, Banking Supervision and Corporate Services, State Bank of Pakistan

Sriganesh Lokanathan, LIRNEasia – Leveraging Mobile 2.0 for Agricultural Market Access [Policy Brief]

Harsha de Silva, PhD, LIRNEasia – mPayments in Public Transport: The case of bus tickets in Sri Lanka [Policy Brief]

Muriuki Mureithi, Summit Strategies, Kenya – mPayments experience in Kenya

Aamir Ibrahim, Chief Strategy Officer, Telenor Pakistan – Mobile 2.0: The telenor experience with EasyPaisa

Session 2: Beyond voice (mGovernment, mCommerce, mSocial Networking)

Chair: Syed Nasrul Karim Ghaznavi, Member (Finance), Pakistan Telecommunication Authority

Shazna Zuhyle, LIRNEasia (on behalf of Ayesha Zainudeen) – Mobile Markets: What works in emerging Asia? [Policy Brief]

Puree Sirasoontorn, LIRNEasia – BuzzCity [Policy Brief]

Prof. Rohan Samarajiva, PhD, LIRNEasia (on behalf of Prof. Subhash Bhatnagar) – eGovernance using mobile platform [Policy Brief]

Parvez Iftikar, CEO, Universal Service Fund – Telecom for all

Session 3: Conditions for Mobile 2.0 (Market entry)

Chair: Khawar Siddique Khokhar, PhD, Member (Technical), Pakistan Telecommunication Authority

Helani Galpaya & Payal Malik, LIRNEasia – Unleashing the potential of mobile 2.0 technologies through efficient spectrum management [Policy Brief]

Prof. Rohan Samarajiva, PhD, LIRNEasia – Mobile number portability [Policy Brief]

Muhammad Talib Dogar, Director General (Services), PTA (Pakistan’s experience with Mobile Number Portability) – Mobile number portability: Pakistan’s Experience

Session 4: Conditions for Mobile 2.0 (Quality of Service Experience)

Chair: Baburajan K., Executive Editor, Voice and Data

Chanuka Wattegama, LIRNEasia – User-centric Broadband Quality Monitoring Approach

Wasim Tauqir, Director General (Strategy & Development), PTA (Pakistan’s experience with Mobile Quality of Service) – Pakistan’s experience with Mobile Quality of Service

Panel Discussion: What Next?

Adnan Shahid, Director (Marketing) , Mobilink Pakistan

Adil Rauf, CEO, Alcatel Lucent, Pakistan

Wangay Dorji, Head- Telecommunications, Bhutan InfoComm and Media Authority

Grace Amberong, Information Technology Officer & Head of Government Portal and Website Development, CICT Philippines (Presentation)

Rohan Samarajiva, PhD, Chair & CEO LIRNEasia

Media Coverage:

Daily Times (Improvement of broadband penetration discussed)

The Hindu Business Line (Mobile 2.0 forum meet begins in Islamabad)

The Hindu Business Line (Pakistan plans big push for IT, rural telecom)

The Hindu Business Line (Connect to the Bottom of the Pyramid)

The Hindu Business Line (Pak ahead of India in use of Universal Service Funds)

The Hindu Business Line (Our telecom licensing is technology-neutral – Interview with Dr Mohommed Yaseen, Chairman, PTA)

Telecom News Bulletin (PTA and LIRNEasia jointly host International Telecom Expert Forum)

The Financial Express (Cell phone use yet to pick up in third world in absence of non-voice services)

The Sunday Times (Internet – unheard of, for many Lankans: Study)

Voice & Data (Pakistan to focus on flung areas for provision of broadband services)

Voice & Data (Telecom can strengthen our bonds in Pakistan)

Voice & Data (Pak Government is looking to expand in to non-voice)

State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

Bangkok Post Tech (Mobile phones offer hope to ‘Bottom of the Pyramid’)

Bangkok Post Tech (Forum discusses ways to break cycle of poverty)

Bangkok Post Tech (India points the way)

A working paper is available here.

MediaShift Idea Lab, 19 Aug 2009:

In the United States, high-end smartphones like the iPhone and BlackBerry don’t have built-in radios. But in Pakistan, even the cheapest cell phones, which don’t have cameras or other features, come with the ability to listen to FM radio…the evolving relationship between mobiles and radios was one of the subjects of a recent report by LIRNEasia, a think tank that studies ICT policy across the Asia Pacific. The most surprising finding was that in three of the countries studied — Bangladesh, India and Pakistan — more people own mobile phones than radios, says Ayesha Zainudeen, research manager at LIRNEasia.

Presentations will be made by Rohan Samarajiva, Harsha de Silva and Ayesha Zainudeen, followed by discussion. Several senior officials of telecom companies, analysts and journalists are expected to attend the event. 

For more information on how to register, please contact Ms. Nirmali Sivapragasam at +94 11 267 1160 (general line).

Teleuse@BOP, pioneered by LIRNEasia in 2005, is a unique series of cutting edge demand-side studies on ICT use among the BOP. The 2008 study was conducted across six countries, India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and most recently, Bangladesh, among a sample of 9500+ BOP (SEC D and E) users. Aside from exploring traditional aspects of access and ownership at the BOP, this study focuses on if and how mobile phones are being used for non-voice, or ‘Mobile2.0’ applications.

COAI was constituted in 1995 as a non-profit, non-governmental society dedicated to the advancement of communication, particularly modern communication through cellular mobile telephony.

More information on the study can be found here.

Appearing in the journal’s second issue for 2008, aptly titled, ‘Emerging Markets in Telecommunications’, the article explores the extent to which “universal access” to telecommunications has been achieved  in Asia, based on findings from LIRNEasia’s five-country study of the use of telecommunication services at the ‘Bottom of the Pyramid’, namely in India, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand.

Very high levels of access, but low levels of ownership are found. The paper then looks at the potential benefits that these non-owner users are missing out on, and then goes on to look at the key barriers to ownership that are faced by them. The paper estimates that there could be close to 150 million new subscribers at the BOP in these five countries by mid-2008. However, a distinct affordability gap is found. Possible ways to deal with this affordability gap are proposed in the final section with emphasis on multiple stakeholder efforts.

Despite being a technical book that addresses complexity out of sheer necessity, the text remains readable, sometimes entertainingly so. Phrases such as ‘governance badlands of South and Southeast Asia’ sum up our grim reality, conjuring images that we are all too familiar with. The editors have also done an excellent job in cross-referencing across chapters, so that the book reads more than a mere amalgamation of chapters. I would have preferred the graphs to be larger and clearer, but then, this comes out from an academic publisher.

As the editors say, the book is an introduction, not a conclusion, “to a new way of governing, especially in areas that rest on specialised, yet incomplete, knowledge such as infrastructure.” It asks more questions than it answers, leaving discerning readers to come to their own conclusions on some issues.

This is not all what Nalaka Gunawadene has to say about ‘ICT Infrastructure in Emerging Asia: Policy and Regulatory Roadblocks’. Edited by Rohan Samarajiva and Ayesha Zainudeen, (IDRC/Sage, 2008) it is an effort to bring together the collective wisdom of telecom researchers, regulators and practitioners around the region, some seen above.

After reading the review in Financial Times, we are certain some of you may want to read the online version of the publication too.

‘BSNL’s monopoly over infrastructure a hindrance to growth’ – Financial Express (India)

Rural connectivity is now the focus of every telecommunication player in the country. Almost all stakeholders, from handset manufacturers to service providers, believe that the next wave of growth is in the rural areas.”However, India’s roll out (of telecom services) in rural areas has been slow. BSNL has the backbone infrastructure but is not yet ready to share it with private players,” he added.

BSNL should be made to share its fibre and access networks, Samarajiva said. With shared infrastructure and innovation in marketing, costs can be brought down further, he said. Moreover, telecom companies should also shift their focus from calculating average revenue per user (Arpu) to average margin per user (Ampu), he added.

Also at:  http://asia.tmcnet.com/news/2007/12/26/3184529.htm
http://in.news.yahoo.com/071226/203/6ovtq.html
http://in.biz.yahoo.com/071226/203/6ovva.html

Book also discussed at Yahoo Tech Group forum.

‘Fact or fiction: Telecommunications in Asia By Liffy Thomas’ – Ergo (the Hindu, India)

At a time when GSM operators, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) and the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) are at an imbroglio over spectrum allocation, Prof Rohan Samarajiva’s book, “ICT Infrastructure in Emerging Asia: Policy and Regulatory Roadblocks”, makes for a timely read. In Chennai for the launch of the book, Samarajiva, Executive Director of LIRNEasia and former Director General of Telecommunications in Sri Lanka, spoke to Liffy Thomas.

BOOK EXTRACT: ‘Subsidising The Smart Way’ – Business World Magazine (India)The Latin American experience holds lessons for the development of rural telephony in Asia, says Harsha De Silva

The supply of telephony has traditionally been skewed towards the urban affluent as opposed to the rural poor. The literature describes this bias as having been caused by a ‘market efficiency gap’ and an ‘access gap’. The market efficiency gap is the difference between what markets achieve under existing conditions and what they can achieve if barriers are removed. This gap can be bridged through effective competition, private provision of services, and market-oriented policies and regulations that create a level playing field for new entrants. The access gap refers to people and places that remain beyond limits of the market due to inadequate income levels or its skewed distribution. Bridging this gap needs subsidies to encourage service providers to enter these areas.

‘Policies for ICT’ – New India Express (Chennai, India) 

WHILE the common perception remains that India has the lowest mobile phone tariffs, other countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have lower tariffs than India, Rohan Samarajiva, executive director, Lirne Asia, said on Tuesday.

Talking about his new book ICT Infrastructure in Emerging Asia – Policy and Regulatory Roadblocks, he said, when compared to all these countries, India’s cost is much higher.

The Deccan Chronicle, Chennai, 16.12.07:

 Policies and regulations are the main bottlenecks blocking the development of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure in India, according to Prof Ashok Jhujhunwala, Telecom and Networks (TeNet) Group, IIT, Madras.

Releasing the book ‘ICT Infrastructure in Emerging Asia: Policy and Regulatory Roadblocks’, a collection of articles edited by Rohan Samarajiva and Ayesha Zainudeen, ICT experts, here on Sunday, Prof Jhunjhunwala said any technological problems associated with ICT could be sorted out by scientists within two to three years. “But the policy-makers and regulators fail to move ahead with the times. We are living in an era when things which were socially desirable once have become commercial to the core,” the professor said. He pointed out that ICT has the potential of helping developing countries tackle a wide range of health, social, and economic problems.

“While urban India is marching rapidly ahead, rural India is being left behind. We have to use ICT to accelerate the growth of rural India,” said Dr Jhunjhunwala. Elaborating on the pace of growth of ICT, Dr Jhunjhunwala said the next two years will see payments through mobile phones catching up all over the country.

“Instead of going to ATM centres or Banks, you can have cash transactions through your mobile phones,” he said. Dr Samarajiva said the book was a step forward in identifying the reasons for under-connectivity in emerging Asia. “The book itself is an introduction, not a conclusion. It reports the findings of a cutting edge demand-side survey of telecom use at the ‘bottom of a pyramid’ in India and Sri Lanka,” said Dr Samarajiva, a former director general of Sri lanka Telecommunications.

He said there is enough scope to bring down telecom charges. “It is the outdated policies of the governments in the region which are playing havoc with the communication revolution. This is aggravating the digital divide which will lead to major catastrophe,” he said.

The publication of the book was co-funded by the IDRC and Social Science Research Council (SSRC).

More information on the book can be found on the book page.

LIRNEasia’s new book, ICT Infrastructure in Emerging Asia: Policy and Regulatory Roadblocks, was unveiled on the 16th of December at the IIT-Madras Campus. The first copies of the book were handed over to Chief Guests of the event, Professor Ashok Jhunjhunwala and Professor William Melody.

Edited by Professor Rohan Samarajiva and Ayesha Zainudeen and co-published by Sage Publications and the IDRC, this well-structured volume brings together scholars, practitioners, former regulators and policy makers to address the problem of expanding ICT connectivity in emerging Asia. It centrally engages the widespread claim that technology by itself—independent of policy and regulatory reform—can improve access to ICTs. In doing so, it shows that complex workarounds are possible, but they are significantly less effective than the appropriate policy and regulatory reforms.

More information on the book is available here. Media coverage can be seen here.

LIRNEasia’s first book, ICT Infrastructure in Emerging Asia: Policy and Regulatory Roadblocks, edited by Rohan Samarajiva and Ayesha Zainudeen will be launched on December 16 2007.

The Chief guests at the event will be Shri K.Sridhara, Member (Technology) & Ex-Officio Secretary to the Government of India, Department of Telecommunications, Ministry of Communications & IT, and Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala, Professor of the Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Madras.

The book looks at the policy and regulatory barriers to the expansion of information and communication technology infrastructure in emerging markets, based on Asian experience and is co-published by SAGE Publications and the International Development Research Centre. More information available at http://www.lirneasia.net/projects/ict-infrastructure-in-emerging-asia/

When it comes to using phones, the film says, people at the bottom of the income pyramid are no different from anyone else; they value the enhanced personal security, including emergency communications, and social networking benefits. Increasingly, poor people are not content with just using public phones or shared access phones (belonging friends or family). They see a utility and social value of having their own phones.

These insights emerged from LIRNEasia’s large representative sample survey of telephone use at BOP in India, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand. The survey conducted by ACNielsen, a multinational market research company, confirmed some known trends, whilst challenging conventional wisdom on several fronts. According to LIRNEasia Lead Economist Dr. Harsha de Silva, the findings completely debunked the myth that 50 per cent of people had never used a telephone.

Part 1

Scroll down for Part 2

The survey also found that men and women use phones pretty much the same way at the bottom of the pyramid. Says Ayesha Zainudeen, Senior Researcher, LIRNEasia: “There are almost no differences between men and women — except in the case of Pakistan, where you have the cultural factors playing in.”

The survey, supported by Canada’s International Development Research Centre, IDRC, has been well received by telecom operators and industry regulators across Asia.
 
The film features an interview with the head of Sri Lanka’s leading mobile phone company, Dialog Telekom, who acknowledges using survey findings to further customise products to suit aspirations at the bottom of the pyramid.                                                                              

The film will be premiered at the Third Global Knowledge Conference (GK3) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, from 11 to 13 December 2007. It will be part of an interactive quiz that LIRNEasia and TVE Asia Pacific will jointly present during the global event, expected to attract 2,000 participants.                                                                                                  

Focusing on the theme “Emerging People, Emerging Markets, Emerging Technologies”, GK3 will connect those in governments, business, civil society and academia engaged in using ICT tools for meeting the real world’s needs — to reduce poverty, increase incomes, create safer communities, create sustainable societies and support youth enterprise, etc.
                                                                                                                                                           The interactive quiz will be conducted by TVEAP Director Nalaka Gunawardene, who counts many years of experience in broadcast quiz shows. He will be joined by LIRNEasia’s research staff to provide the live audience with interesting insights into the wide-ranging survey.

The telecom industry believes that the next billion phone subscribers will come mostly from the emerging markets. Therefore, understanding tele-use at the bottom of the pyramid becomes very important.

As with all TVEAP films, Teleuse@BOP will be available to broadcast, civil society and educational users without a license fee.

Both LIRNEasia and TVE Asia Pacific are members of the Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP), conveners of the GK3 platform.

Part 2

Pre-publication version available for download. The paper was presented at the Centre for Poverty Analysis Annual Symposium on Poverty Research in Sri Lanka (6-7 December 2007, Colombo)

Introduction:
Much has been said of the benefits of access to telecommunication especially at the ‘Bottom of the Pyramid’. The economic as well as social benefits from such access can, in theory enable people to graduate from poverty and also contribute more widely to development. Thus it can be argued that inequality in access to telecom services can lead to limitations in fighting poverty.

Many in the ‘ICT for development’ movement highlight the benefits that telecommunication, the Internet and other information and communication technologies (broadly put, ICTs) can bring to the table in the fight against poverty. A number of studies have attempted to demonstrate the impacts of access on income at the macro-level. However supporting evidence for these arguments at the household level is limited at best.

This paper takes a unique look at telecom access and studies the perceived impacts of direct access to telecom services, that is, telephone ownership at a household level at the ‘Bottom of the Pyramid’ in five developing Asian countries. It focuses on the perceived economic impact (positive or negative) of telecom ownership in terms of the potential to increase indirect income generation capacity or save on expenditure or transactions costs. The findings reveal that some telecom users do perceive the economic benefits of direct access to be high, but this finding is not seen across the board for a number of reasons explained.

The paper is based on a large sample survey of telecom users at the BOP in Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Thailand. Section 2 reviews the existing literature on the impacts of telecommunication. Section 3 explains the study design and methodology, and examines the difficulties faced in conducting a study of this nature and the methodological innovations undertaken. Section 4 explores in detail the impacts of telecom services at the BOP in the five countries. Section 5 concludes, looking at the policy implications from the study.