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.

The reason I saw this book is because they had cited what I had written, based on synthesizing the research from the Mobile More than Voice work we did in 2008-10. But our work is cited, not engaged with. Yes, it is problematic to access the Internet on feature phones over wireless platforms. But more problematic is how one gets millions of households connected to 5MB FTTP pipes of their dreams, when even connecting copper was an impossible dream.

No one believed that operators could make money at ARPUs of less that USD 5. But it happened because new business models were implemented and costs per unit came down to levels hitherto unthinkable. This is how wireless broadband will work. The sooner we stop talking about castles in the air, the sooner the day will come when all who want to use broadband will be able to.

Sri Lanka, an island nation located in the Indian Ocean just south of India, has lately experienced an explosion in the use of broadband services. This report, part of the Broadband Strategies Toolkit, explores the various factors that have contributed to Sri Lanka’s broadband success, ranging from innovative business models to government investment in e-development services.

The next great expansion of the world’s digital infrastructure is under way in developing markets like those of China, Brazil and Argentina, according to a global census of the industry released on Monday.

Despite growing concerns of a global economic slowdown, the companies that construct and operate data centers that run the Internet and store vast amounts of corporate and government data expect growth next year to match levels last seen in the world economy’s boom years: about 19 percent.

The census focused on data centers, the buildings and complexes filled with the computers that operate the Internet, store and process e-mail, preserve medical records, carry out Web searches and perform countless other tasks for corporations, governments and other organizations. The London-based company that released the results, DatacenterDynamics, said it conducted some 5,400 interviews this year with industry officials around the world. Those officials are responsible for about 100,000 data centers, the company said.