Helani Galpaya presentation on “Network bottlenecks in South Asian broadband?”
Rohan Samarajiva and Abu Saeed Khan presentation on “Removing a broadband bottleneck: International connectivity”
Payal Malik presentation on “How do we avoid the spectrum bottleneck?”
Sriganesh Lokanathan presentation on “Teleuse@BOP4”

The session was, unusually for a North American event, highly international. Judith Mariscal of Mexico (and our sister organization DIRSI) chaired. Carleen Maitland of the US National Science Foundation talked about the importance of fiber for national research and education networks in Africa. Roxana Barrentes of DIRSI presented evidence on the marginal relevance of fiber for general broadband access in Latin America. Christoph Stork of RIA, our sister organization in Africa, made a data rich presentation on the current situation and future prospects for broadband in the African countries studied by RIA. When huge percentages of households lack electricity, there is not much to be said for laying fiber to homes!

In conditions of market-driven ICT rollout, I see little value in getting excited about the technology used by suppliers of last-mile access. My presentation presented data from S Korea, Hong Kong China and Sri Lanka. In the case of Korea and Hong Kong, the end results are about the same. The public funds spent are extraordinarily different. Korea is a poster child for spending with little regard for benefits. If countries have that kind of money and time (Korea has been working on broadband since the 1980s, even before the term was invented!), they should try to emulate Korea.

But Sri Lanka is more like the resource and capacity constrained countries that LIRNEasia and its sister organizations serve. Even with the most generous assumptions we’d be lucky to connect 18% of households to ADSL. What are the chances of laying fiber to all the households?

What we need to do is to push the fiber out as close as possible to human settlements; and create the market conditions for multiple access providers to connect people to the services they need using whatever technology that makes business sense. It will probably make sense to connect universities (Carleen’s clients) and businesses using fiber. But for the rest of us it will be wireless.

presentation.

Irrespective of the on-going, completely unnecessary, “controversy” surrounding auction of 3G in Pakistan, allotting 3G frequencies to telecom operators is extremely urgent and essential for Pakistan. We have already been left behind by others who used to be our followers in 2G. Mobile broadband – or 3G – should have been introduced here already four years ago. The delay has made us lose huge opportunities relating to job creation, international trade, economic growth and Foreign Direct Investment (Telecom FDI 2007: US$1,824 mil and 2011: US$ 79 mil). Not to mention letting the technology gap between the advanced countries and us widen even more, despite the fact that more than 70% of our population is below 35 – normally considered early adopters of modern technology.

Read his full statement.

Many ideas worth consideration by policy makers (represented on the panel by Secretary MOPT S.K. Bose) and regulators (represented by BTRC Chair Ahmed, who also chaired the session) were presented from the panel of speakers as well as the audience.

The slideset that I planned to use is here. Didn’t get through all of it because I kept to the allotted 15 mts.

Fixed broadband connectivity alone cannot provide the Internet needs of Sri Lanka. Mobile broadband must step up and provide for the country’s needs, according to Dumindra Ratnayaka, the Chief Executive of the local mobile unit of UAE-based telco Etisalat, in an exclusive interview with the Business Times. He also added there were only 250,000 fixed broadband subscribers to date, despite almost a decade of availability. However, in terms of mobile, there were already 12 million individual subscribers which was already a significant base of users to convert to mobile broadband. Also, 3G was best “beyond voice” as this technology’s adoption in the data industry has been very different than in voice. As such, he asserted that Etisalat would be “strongly moving on mobile broadband.”

Mr. Ratnayaka also noted that the biggest challenge for the Sri Lankan market was not investment, but devices (smartphones, tablet PCs, etc) being available, at the right price. He also revealed that it was only when mobile phones were offered at the right price that the local market exploded. Further suggesting that “in five years, smartphones will be everywhere,” he noted that a goal for Etisalat was making this happen much sooner, which was why another focus area for the mobile operator was bringing down the cost of devices.

Report.

Nokia Siemens Networks, the equipment joint venture of Nokia and Siemens, said Wednesday that it planned to cut almost a quarter of its work force as it sought to bolster profit in a stagnating market for network gear.

The company said it planned to eliminate 17,000 jobs by the end of 2013 in a wide-ranging austerity program to enable Nokia Siemens to refocus on mobile broadband equipment, the fastest-growing segment of the market. The reductions will slash the company’s work force by 23 percent from its current level of 74,000.

Report.

But the really good stuff is in Para 53.

The Telecommunications Regulatory Commission will implement policies and strategies to encourage telecommunication companies to give priority for the development of broad-band network facilities. In keeping with development priorities, telecommunication charges on incoming and outgoing calls will be revised suitably.

Since the LKR 2 billion expected to be generated by the increases in taxes on incoming calls (from USD 0.07 to 0.09 per minute) and on outgoing calls (from LKR 2 to LKR 3) is reflected in the new revenue measures (Table 1), I was scratching my head about this last sentence. It seemed, on the surface, like an ordinary revenue-raising measure; what did it have to do with encouraging broadband development?

But then I realized that it would. Because international calls will be made more expensive by the LKR 3/mt tax on outgoing calls, Sri Lankans will have greater incentive to call their friends, relatives and business contacts using Skype and Gtalk. This will create demand for broadband. All that one needs is a dongle and mobile signal. The government won’t get its 3 rupees, the telecom operators will see their international revenues dipping. But on the good side there will be more demand for broadband. But this is “in keeping with development priorities.”

I still have to figure out the hidden wisdom behind the decision to raise the tax on incoming calls from USD 0.07 (app. LKR 8) to USD 0.09 (app LKR 10). This will, for sure, increase incentives to engage in bypass or grey-market business. The TRC and Police will have lots to do, shutting down bypass businesses and running newspaper ads. The flow of black money into the economy will increase, which is useful for political campaigns and such. Perhaps people will use black money to obtain broadband services? This bit is a work in progress. Ideas, suggestions welcome.

In general, the Glasnost results suggest that telecom and cable TV operators, when they do use throttling, do so mostly to suppress bandwidth hogs and ensure a reasonable experience for all of their customers. Mr. Dischinger, now a computer engineer in Innsbruck, Austria, said throttling was much more commonly used by operators of mobile phone networks, which have much less capacity than landline grids.

But with operators starting to sell superfast landline broadband service for heavy data users, such as Deutsche Telekom’s high-speed fiber-to-the-home service, the competition for bandwidth — and the need for throttling — will only increase, Mr. Dischinger said.

“I highly doubt it can go on forever,” Mr. Dischinger said. “I cannot envision with the current network infrastructure they have that operators can continue to support people in the long term without more investment.”

One other metric is available to anyone, just go to facebook.com/ads and create an ad. It will tell you how many people your ad can reach. For people of all ages, that number is 1,126,020. That is, Facebook has 1.13 million users that claim they’re in Sri Lanka. Even if you lop off 130,000 as errors, it’s still over a million Sri Lankans on Facebook.

So What Now?
So, to come round the bend, my rough guess is we have at least two million people on the Internet, or about 10% of the population. The raw numbers say 1.3 million, so why round-up so much? Well, because connections are used by multiple people, and I think we must have more Internet users than Facebook accounts. A lot of people also use the net at work, and thus wouldn’t be counted.

These are only a few graphs and download speeds are only one measure. What’s nice is that we can now quite confidently say Sri Lanka’s Internet and not be talking about a niche product. There are at least 280,000 fixed subscribers (including dial-up, ADSL and WiMax) and around 300,000 mobile broadband subscribers. There are also over 1 million HSPA/3G mobile users with active data use. This is all via Helani’s report btw.

The rub is that while more Sri Lankans are on the Internet, we are all wasting a bunch of time and getting frustrated at how slow it is. And while, to a degree, that may be out of any one company’s control (except perhaps the state controlled SLT), their advertising certainly is in their control, and the advertised speeds are offensively wrong.

In an effort to expand broadband Internet service, the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday approved an overhaul of its fund that subsidizes rural telephone service, turning it into one meant to offer broadband service to the millions of Americans who lack high-speed connections.

The plan could lead to higher fees for consumers on their telephone landlines because the commission also approved changes in the complex compensation system by which telecommunications companies pay one another for completing or carrying calls on one another’s systems.

Full report.

We’ve been talking about a data tsunami/flood for some time now. The basic argument has been that data use will increase massively causing congestion on the expensive cable links to the cloud and will degrade user experience.

Here is another way to tell the same story. What is happening to hotels today, will happen to countries where most Internet content is external. Asian governments and broadband suppliers have a choice: act now to increase cable capacity and thereby reduce capacity costs from their currently excessive levels (3-6 times those of Europe and N America); or wait ’till the tsunami hits.

Largely because of the broad use of iPads and other mobile tablets, which are heavy users of video streaming, the guest room Wi-Fi networks that most hotels thought they had brought up to standard just a few years ago are now often groaning under user demands.

“The iPad is the fastest-selling device in consumer electronics history, and because of it the demand placed on any public place Wi-Fi system has gone up exponentially in the last year and a half,” said David W. Garrison, the chief executive of iBAHN, a provider of systems for the hotel and meetings industries.

This means more hotel customers are unhappy with their Internet connections. Hotel owners, meanwhile, who are digging out from a two-year slump caused by the recession, will probably have to invest more money to provide more bandwidth.

For travelers, it may mean still another fee, since hotels will be paying their own Internet bills. Some hotel Internet service providers are proposing a solution that offers tiered Wi-Fi service. The lowest level, suitable for basic Internet requirements like checking e-mail, would be free, but other levels would be priced depending on bandwidth requirements. According to iBAHN, iPads consume four times more Wi-Fi data per month than the average smartphone.

The iPad represents the “final nail in the coffin” for the idea that all Internet is free, Mr. Garrison said.

Full story.

But they are not publicly available in Sri Lanka. Our custom in such circumstances is to publish the best available data and ask the parties who know (and who are embarrassed by the outrageous prices we show) to correct us. If they do not, we will assume the number we published is correct.

The October 2011 broadband price benchmarks are here.

It shows that the price of a 2Mbps 2KM leased line connection is 16 times that of Bhutan. This is outrageous, given Bhutan’s difficult terrain and later liberalization.

This suggests that Internet charges should also be high in Sri Lanka. They are not, which is the mystery. Hope someone, hopefully the people at the Telecom Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka, will unravel the mystery.

Only 68 percent of Americans with access to high-speed broadband Internet are using it, while in places like South Korea the rate is 90 percent.

More than 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies — including Wal-Mart and Target — require job applicants to apply online.

Various studies have shown that the major reasons people do not have broadband are: the cost of Internet services and the cost of computers; not knowing how to use a computer; and not understanding why the Internet is relevant.

As mobile, web-connected devices become ubiquitous, the volume of data they produce will soar. Cisco, a technology company, reckons that by 2015 some 6.3 exabytes of mobile data will be flowing each month, or the equivalent of 63 billion copies of The Economist.