LIRNEasia’s preliminary round of mobile broadband quality testing in selected locations in Western Province unveils both hopes and issues. The good news is that the quality of both key pre-paid mobile broadband services is satisfactory, in majority of locations. However, unusual quality drops in several places indicates that this performance is not always a certainty. In general, a mobile broadband user in Western Province can expect a reasonable quality unless a rare issue like the distance from a tower or a higher number of simultaneous users hinders it.

LIRNEasia tested the broadband quality of the popular pre-paid High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) broadband connections of the two key providers. Packages offered by the third provider were not tested only because the operator prevented pinging from outside the network. Mobile test applications newly developed and released by Zamsana PLC, were used on mobile handsets for testing. To further simulate the true conditions the tests were done on public transport.

We saw little reason testing mobile broadband quality from fixed locations. It should be done on the move as that is how it is used. We could have done it from a car, but purposely did it from a bus to examine how conditions beyond our control can affect the performance.

Testers used mobile test applications developed for Symbian and Windows CE, the two most popular mobile operating systems used in Sri Lanka. They took both stationary and on the move readings at key points along four main roads from Colombo to Kalutara, Negombo, Avissawella and Nittambuwa. Apart from the download and upload speeds, the two most common parameters the tools recorded Return Trip Time or RTT (the time taken by data packets to reach a destination server and return), Jitter (the variation in RTT), Packet Loss (what percentage of packets were lost on the way) and the availability. The actual values were compared with the promises of the operators or, if no operator specifications were available against international standards.

Mobile broadband quality testing is a part of LIRNEasia’s broadband Quality of Service Experience (QoSE) benchmarking work. With its partner organization‐ the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, LIRNEasia has been testing broadband quality since the beginning of 2008. The first tests were conducted manually. Later the test methodology was standardized and a software application was developed to get more accurate results. First round of testing was done only in Colombo and Chennai, but now the scope is expanded to cover New Delhi, Dhaka, Mumbai and Bangalore.

A direct approach to monitor Quality of Service Experience (QoSE) would be for the regulator to reach deep into the innards of the telecom network to install monitoring equipment and take remedial actions as per the licenses or the governing statute whenever the data indicate below‐standard performance, says LIRNEasia. Dearth of financial and human resources can be a key challenge for such an approach. The second approach is based largely on user activism. Educated users are expected to voluntarily contribute their time and computing resources towards building a performance database which in turn will be used in creating the bigger picture.

A comprehensive methodology to benchmark Broadband Quality of Service Experience (QoSE), based on the latter approach has been developed jointly by LIRNEasia and the TeNeT Group of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT‐M). While there is no barrier for regulators to use it, the methodology is largely user centric. Instead of depending on one time pinging, this methodology uses AT‐Tester, an open source software tool to monitor all crucial QoSE broadband metrics over a longer period, on both weekends and weekdays, covering peak as well as off‐peak traffic. The traffic is also monitored within segments, ISP, local and international.

(The figure above shows the average peak time download speed to an international server offered by the pre‐paid mobile broadband packages of the two key mobile broadband providers on a selected date. The ceiling is the promised speed of 1 Mbps. Speeds may vary depending upon the type of the handset, time of the day, number of simultaneous users connected to a tower and the weather conditions. Please click on image for an enlarged version.)

Anybody could have guessed this. It is unimaginable that entire world will go through a recession simultaneously. Not everyone can be losers for too long. There should be winners somewhere. For example, what would the US firms that find their human resources costs, logically do? They outsource to Bangalore. So the BPO industry in India grows. Peter’s loss becomes Patel’s gain.

The Economist today presented the evidence.

MOODY’S Economy.com has mapped the geographic spread of the worst global downturn since the Depression. All of North America is in recession now. In Europe only Norway, Slovenia and Slovakia have avoided a similar fate, although Moody’s reckons these countries are on the brink of a downturn. Emerging Asia looks cheerier, although the small export-led economies of Singapore and Hong Kong are shrinking, as are Malaysia and Thailand. Even the BRICs are looking a bit diminished, with downturns in both Brazil and Russia. At least India and China are growing (the latter at a pace that is causing worries about overheating). Data for Africa are spotty but the continent’s biggest economy, South Africa, is in recession. The IMF expects global GDP to shrink by 1.4% this year, with rich countries’ economies contracting by around 3.8%.

In the end, Microsoft’s best intentions may not satisfy what locals want. The company surveyed 8,000 people in emerging markets and found their most pressing needs for technology often revolved around entertainment and surfing the Internet.

“It reinforced for us that the emerging middle classes are sort of like the middle classes here except they don’t have as much money,” Mr. Toyama said. “It’s sometimes easy for us to get caught up in things and forget we are serving the needs of real people.”

The above comes from a story on Microsoft’s social research unit in Bangalore, an organization LIRNEasia has had many interactions with, and hopes to work with in the future as well.

We were under the impression that they did mostly qualitative research, and that we were the only people doing quantitative research in the region, but the story refers to an 8,000 person survey. Well, you learn something new everyday.

“The first cyber cafe will be inaugurated on Friday at New Delhi Railway Station. Based on the feedback of the users, we are intending to extend to over 200 important stations in the country in the first phase by the end of this year,” Kumar told reporters at the commissioning of the “optic fibre communication link on Bangalore-Secunderabad, Secunderabad- Vijayawada-Chennai and Chennai-Ooty-Bangalore” here.

The railways would also experiment by providing broadband Internet access on moving train, the first such instance in the world, he said. The service would be launched on a train this year.

Read the full story in ‘Hindustan Times’ here.

Sir Arthur imagined what the world could be. In some cases, such as the geostationary orbit that was named after him, he even did the mathematics to substantiate his imagination. But the mathematics was not the true achievement: it was that he imagined this wondrous idea of a specific orbit where satellites would be stationary in relation to the earth and could therefore serve as very tall towers for wireless transmissions with line of sight covering one third of the surface of the globe; it was that he imagined it a decade before anything had been sent that far into space and before the rockets with power had been designed.

His was a creative mind until the end. I recall him saying that we should consider a single time zone for the world at a video conference that we participated in back in 1998. I remember then laughing and telling him off camera that only he could get away with such outlandish and impractical claims. Yet, as I saw young people working in BPOs in Bangalore and Manila and then Colombo running to world time, I began to see his point.

I recall him forwarding me an e-mail from BT labs around 2000 asking what could be done on Giga Bit network. I, cautious quasi-bureaucrat, talked about the dangers of supply-side push. But Sir Arthur was all imagination. Today, when the YouTube site consumes as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000, I realize the incredible ability of that wonderful mind.

Satellites for arms control. He thought it first. And then Ronald Reagan said, famously, “doveryai, no proveryai” (trust but verify).

He also imagined Sri Lankan living in peace. With Sir Arthur’s track record, may be we stand a chance.

A generous man and a kind man. It was easy to be generous with money when you plenty. But he was generous with time, the scarcest of all commodities. I was an underling at the Arthur C. Clarke Centre for Modern Technologies in 1985-86, tasked with connecting Sri Lanka to the inchoate Internet, then Arpanet. He paid attention to my project, invited me to play with his lifetime CompuServe subscription from his home at a time when international calls were like gold. It was rarely that he declined an invitation or refused an appointment for a visitor wanting an autograph and a photograph.

He cared. I recall one of the early “Internet to your home” programs I was helping with at the government TV channel in 1999. In the run up to the millennium, we had cooked up this idea of asking significant people to name five people who had made the most important contributions to the dying 20^th century, and then doing live web searches about the named individuals to demonstrate the power of the Internet. Few hours before the first show was to air, I got a desperate call. They did not have the person to answer the question lined up.

Sir Arthur to the rescue. I called him from the studio live. He spoke on speaker phone and I translated his list and rationale. I still recall the thought he had given to his list and rationale. The inventor of the jet engine was on his list, beyond the usual suspects.

The show went on for all of 1999. I recall how often Sri Lankans of significance who were asked to give their lists included Sir Arthur among the five. There he was, in the company of Gandhi and Mandela.

We were fortunate to have him live here in Sri Lanka with us. Over the last thirty years, not much good news has come out of this country. War, refugees, riots, tsunami. It gets kind of tiresome when you’re at lunch with a bunch of foreigners, someone asks where you’re from, and then a pall of gloom descends on the table because the talk is of war and suicide bombers.

I used to say I was from Sri Lanka, where Arthur Clarke lived. And then, we’d have a pleasant lunch-time conversation about the literary license he had taken to move Sri Lanka south to the equator so that the space elevators could be located there (Fountains of Paradise, 1979) or his claim that the oceans surrounding Sri Lanka were the closest he could get to outer space in his life time.

Thank you, Sir Arthur.

This was written for Montage, the monthly news magazine.

Instead of resting on its laurels as the preferred IT services destination, technology players and academics in India must look to creating compelling products for the domestic and global market with an eye on cornering at least $15 billion worth business by 2015. This was the challenge thrown out by the National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom) to the Indian IT industry, at its annual Product Conclave that opened in Bangalore on Nov 19, 2007. (Read the report in ‘The Hindu’)

Interestingly, last month Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala noted the same at the recent Wireless World Research Forum meeting in Chennai. He predicted India entering to the world leaders club as a design house in 2009 and a telecom product house by 2013. (See the presentation here)

As India knows well, the challenge of course is not just to find the right technology. The right products also need to have a price tag affordable to the millions at the bottom of the pyramid to attract the massive local market. It would be interesting to watch how India would face these dual challenges.

VillageNet, the Bangalore initiative, is a low cost IEEE 802.11 WiFi based mesh network designed for connecting villages in rural India, providing low-cost broadband Internet access for wide regions. It targets the rural market around the world, where large populations live but paying capacities are low. VillageNet offers a low-cost, high performance alternative to traditional wireline and cellular technologies that have prohibitively expensive deployment costs. VillageNet connects villages in a mesh using long-distance wireless links. The cost of building the network is kept low by using off-the-shelf IEEE 802.11 equipment and optimizing the network topology to minimize cost.

Jaiswal spoke about the unique interference models for such point-to-point mesh networks, and then introduced challenges around channel allocation and scheduling of links in the network (which are independent of the underlying wireless technology – WiFi or WiMAX).

He also discussed network planning problems unique to such point-point mesh networks, and not surprisingly many of them were similar to the ones encountered in implementing the Mesh network at Mahavilachchiya.

Responding to the Asian challenge

ARE consumers in India and China too poor to afford high-quality Western goods? That used to be the old idea of doing business in these countries as firms offered watered-down versions of their products at reduced prices. Mr van Houten, of chipmaker NXP, says Indian and Chinese consumers are forcing multinationals to design sophisticated products that more closely meet their needs, and this is making firms operating in Asia better innovators.

By recruiting ingenious local engineers and designers in places like Bangalore and Beijing, and paying close attention to trends and practices in the market, firms are coming up with products and services that can be sold in other parts of the world too. Nokia’s engineers are finding that many Chinese and Indians access the internet mainly through their mobile handsets. Such customers’ requirements of their handsets may therefore be quite different to those of Western users, many of whom have computers at home and at work.

GE’s research lab in China has come up with a simplified magnetic-resonance imaging machine that costs a fraction of the one it sells in rich countries. The firm now plans to sell it worldwide. Wenda, a question-and-answer “knowledge community” product developed by Google in China to help overcome a lack of local content, was launched in Russia in June.

Unilever has long had a strong distribution network in India, but it has expanded its efforts with a division called Shakti, which provides Indian women’s self-help groups with business education and the chance to earn a living selling cheap sachets of Unilever products. The effort has proved so successful that Unilever introduced a high-tech element: the Shakti entrepreneurs now run kiosks with personal computers which villagers can rent to send e-mails and browse the web for things that can make a big difference to their lives, like market prices.

Alan Lafley, who ran some of Procter & Gamble’s Asian businesses before getting the top job at the American company, says many Asian firms began imitating what foreign ones did but are now “very innovative, especially with business models”.

Mr Lafley sees Indian firms shaking up the way foreign companies operate, and not only with back-office services where many began. Hours after he uttered those words, Wipro, an Indian pioneer of software services said it would open a new development centre in Atlanta, Georgia, that will report to its headquarters in Bangalore.

This is forcing P&G to innovate in other ways too. Mr Lafley uses the example of detergents in China, where the company is using a low-cost manufacturing method which he likens to Coca-Cola’s “syrup” model, which supplies a concentrate to local bottlers. P&G provides secret, high-value “performance chemicals” to Chinese partners, who add basic ingredients and packaging before distributing the products.

BANGALORE, India (AFP) — India remains the favoured technology outsourcing destination, an industry report said Sunday, amid concerns a rising rupee and soaring wages would blunt the country’s competitive edge.

A study by industry publication Global Services and investment advisory firm Tholons put the Indian cities of Chennai, Hyderabad and Pune at the top of a list of 15 emerging outsourcing destinations for global companies.

Kolkata at number five and Chandigarh at number nine were the other two Indian locations on the list, which contained three Chinese and two Vietnamese cities as well.The three hot cities for outsourcing from China were Shanghai at number eight, Beijing at 10 and Shenzhen at 13. Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi were put at number six and number 12.

Cebu in the Philippines came in at number four, the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo at seven, Cairo at 11, Buenos Aires at 14 and Sao Paulo at 15, the study’s sponsors said in a statement released in Bangalore.

The list is based on criteria such as scale and quality of workforce, financial infrastructure, risk environment and quality of life.

But it does not include established outsourcing locations such as Bangalore, the New Delhi capital region, Manila, Mumbai and Dublin that have had a decade’s headstart.

Costs are surging in the prime cities in India, which has earned a reputation as the world’s back office, as property values and rentals rise and wages increase at an annual pace of more than 15 percent amid a shortage of skilled employees.

Indian outsourcing firms are also feeling the pinch from an appreciating rupee, which dents dollar-billed earnings, forcing them to cut costs by expanding to less expensive locations.

“With the demand-supply gap widening, newer tier II cities will play a critical role in re-engineered globalisation models,” said Tholons chairman Avinash Vashistha.

“Destinations will need to provide greater level of cost effectiveness and operational efficiency.”

India’s outsourcing companies have thrived by winning work from companies in the US and Europe that sought to tap the country’s low costs and large employee pool by handing over jobs ranging from answering customers’ calls to risk management and financial analysis.

Pure-play outsourcing firms account for about 10 percent of the 50 billion dollars in revenue logged in the year ended March by the entire information technology industry, which also includes software giants such as Tata Consultancy and Infosys.

Parents are best positioned to make these kinds of decisions, not blowhard Babus.  The state should not try to micro-manage people’s lives.  Leave the decisions to those best positioned to make them; don’t issue regulations that are impossible to enforce.   Is that too much to grasp?

India News – India State News, KA: Ban on mobile phone use by students

Karnataka government has decided to ban use of mobile phones by school children aged below 16 and sale of handsets to them in order to protect their health. The decision was adopted at a meeting of Education and Health Department in Bangalore. The measure comes in the wake of several studies which pointed to adverse effects radiation from mobile phones will have on the brain and the IQ level of children of this age group. Minister for Health R Ashok and Minister Primary and Secondary Education Basavaraj Horatti, speaking to reporters after chairing the high-level meeting in Bangalore on Tuesday, said a government order would be issued to this effect in a week’s time.

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By Saritha Rai, New York Times, June 5, 2006
BANGALORE, India, June 4 — The world’s biggest computer services company could not have chosen a more appropriate setting to lay out its strategy for staying on top.
On Tuesday, on the expansive grounds of the Bangalore Palace, a colonial-era mansion once inhabited by a maharajah, the chairman and chief executive of I.B.M., Samuel J. Palmisano, will address 10,000 Indian employees. He will share the stage with A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, India’s president, and Sunil Mittal, chairman of the country’s largest cellular services provider, Bharti Tele-Ventures. An additional 6,500 employees will look in on the town hall-style meeting by satellite from other Indian cities.

On the same day, Mr. Palmisano and other top executives will meet here with investment analysts and local customers to showcase I.B.M.’s global integration capabilities in a briefing customarily held in New York. During the week, the company will lead the 50 analysts on a tour of its Indian operations.

The meetings are more than an exercise in public and investor relations. They are an acknowledgment of India’s critical role in I.B.M.’s strategy, providing it with its fastest-growing market and a crucial base for delivering services to much of the world.

“A significant part of any large project that we do worldwide is today being delivered out of here,” said Shanker Annaswamy, I.B.M.’s managing director for India, who presides over what is now the company’s second-largest worldwide operation. In the last few years, even as the company has laid off thousands of workers in the United States and Europe, the growth in I.B.M.’s work force in India has been remarkable. From 9,000 employees in early 2004, the number has grown to 43,000 (out of 329,000 worldwide), making I.B.M. the country’s largest multinational employer.