These health workers (few of them are in the photo with their backs to you) were given training and mobilized with the mHealthSurvey, mobile phone application, for submitting patient disease/syndrome data for the surveillance of epidemiological events. Data that used to take over 15 days to relay up to the paper chain, but was not subject to any detection analysis (i.e. just reporting), now takes several seconds. Moreover, the RTBP collects all communicable and non-communicable diseases along witht their syndrome opposed to a handful of diseases (i.e. Integrated Disease Surveillance Program S and P list of diseases). Each Primary Health Center sends over 100 patient records (probable, suspected, and confirmed cases) a day that is now subject to, RTBP introduced, real-time health event detection analysis. Although there were some errors due to misspelling at the begining, once they were asked to be cautious and were made aware of the consequences of the errors resulting in false statistics that may lead to false alarms of disease outbreaks, they have reduced the error rates to almost zero.

Dr. Ganesan M., (Senior Program Officer, RTBI – extreme left seated at head table, facing you, talking the Health Workers in the photo), present the paper titled: Real-Time Bio-Surveillance Program: Field Experiences from Tamil Nadu, India at the 7th Indian Association for Social Sciences and Health (IASSH) conference on Health, Poverty and Human Development held at Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi from 5th to 7th March 2010. Dr. Ganesan is part of the research team at the Indian Institute of Technology – Madras’s Rural Technology and Business Incubator (RTBI) conducting the RTBP action research in the state of Tamil Nadu, India.

View the conference presentation slides

Read a brief on the conference participation

Global shipments of handsets had been falling every quarter since the third quarter of 2008, when the global financial crisis erupted, according to market research firm Strategy Analytics.

But shipments surged by 10 percent in the last three months of 2009, “signaling an end to the industry’s year-long recession,” Strategy Analytics said in a January 29 report.

Smartphones alone grew even faster in the fourth quarter, jumping 30 percent.

Sony Ericsson and Samsung, the world’s second biggest mobile phone maker behind Nokia, have small slices of the smartphone segment, which is dominated by Nokia, iPhone-maker Apple and BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion (RIM).

Samsung unveiled its new touch-screen handset, the Samsung Wave, on Sunday, as part of its plans to triple its smartphone sales to 18 million units this year.

“This is a new era, the smartphone era,” JK Shin, the head of Samsung’s Electronics mobile business, said at a launch party for the Wave.

“Samsung is committed to making the smartphone era available for everyone. We are committed to making the smartphone era a true democracy for billions of people on all continents in all corners of the world,” Shin said.

As neither we nor most of our readers do not have access to the thread it was posted, we like to continue the discussion here.

__________________________________________________________________

Hi people,

I come from one of the ten largest economies in the world, with nearly 200 million people, 8.5 million km2, and 5.564 municipalities, where 94% of the people do *not* have access to any form of broadband – the “B” in the famous BRIC acronym.

I am just coming out of the IGF workshop “Expanding broadband access for a global Internet economy: development dimensions”. I left the workshop a bit shocked with the concepts expressed, not by the AT&T representative (who not surprisingly said AT&T subdsidiaries countries other than the USA should be considered local companies because they employ local people), who as usual is just doing his job in defending the so-called “market”, but by other speeches which seemed to completely ignore that, in most of our contries, there is a de facto monopoly or cartel situation regarding the telco infrastructure, and that public policy ought to centrally take this into account if the aim is to universalize broadband access with quality to all families.

One of the speakers (from LIRNEasia) said that “lower prices require lower costs” and therefore one should just “phase out universal access levies and rationalize taxes”. I retorted that pricing per Mb/s of ADSL broadband in São Paulo might be 65 times higher than the same price charged by the same company in London — and therefore no amount of levies or taxes would justify such scandalous pricing difference, not to speak of the much lower QoS.

I suggested that, instead of eliminating the universal service funds (whose levies are a very small portion of price composition of broadband), we should insist on reforming policy regarding the use of these funds. The reply I heard was that it makes no sense to keep funds that are not used or are squandered (!!). Impact of the fund’s levy in Brazil is just 1% of the price of the fixed line telephone connection — its impact in the price of broadband (a separate bill even if the service is not unbundled) is zero.

There was also a recommendation that we should be “gentle on QoS” to facilitate things regarding universalization of access — fascinating. Again, examples abound in which telcos guarantee only 10% of the nominal contracted rate, and in practice this might be even less. Should we just agree with absurds like this in the name of “it is better to have something than nothing”???

And then there is the crucial question of unbundling, central to the policy debate in the developed countries as it directly impacts universalization through an effective reduction of prices for the final user. It is a major challenge for broadband public policy in developing countries, where regulators are usually in the hands of the telco cartels. The word was not mentioned (not a single time) by anyone in the panel, as if irrelevant to the development dimensions of broadband.

The speaker also mentioned that the “need” to reduce costs for the big telcos would require reduction of international bandwidth costs. One of the two big carriers in Brazil, a Brazilian conglomerate, owns redundant fiber running from Brazil to Miami in rings passing through countries in the Caribbean and Central America. They own their own international link, in summary. So do the other carrier in the de facto duopoly — a major operator from Europe. This does not make any difference in pricing for the final user, although it does contribute to their profits in Brazil being far higher than in Europe for example.

Finally, the fascination with mobile. Of course the AT&T speaker started his talk by waving a fancy iPhone to the audience — mostly natural for a commercial wireless giant. But the infoDev representative and others mentioned mobile as a “solution” for the poor, and not even bothered to separate the discussion in the two main topics here: first, the mobile phone as a connectivity device to enable the user to fully use the Internet through a friendly human-machine interface, be it a common PC or special equipment for people with disabilities; second, the phone itself as *the* alternative to the full user experience that a PC or similar might provide. It seems the agency bureaucrats are satisfied with having two castes of users: a small minority of the ones who can fully use the Internet as it evolves requiring more and more multimedia capabilities on both sides (server and client), and the ones relegated to a small device on which it is barely possible to type small messages.

In the first regional LA&C preparatory meeting for the IGF, in 2008, a representative of a major telco said we should not worry about bringing the next billion to the Internet — they have cell phones, so they are connected already, problem solved. I wonder if this executive would take the place of a carpenter looking for a job, who has to compose and send by email his CV together with images of letters of recommendation to his would-be employer, and had nothing but a cell phone (smart or not) to do it. Not to speak of comparing the executive’s thin-fingered hands of a pianist with the big callous hands of the carpenter.

fraternal regards

–c.a.

The story would have been different if he had a mobile

Take the story of Lasantha Gimhana Kanewela (10), for example. (Divaina, August 17, 2009) Having his extracurricular activities called off, this ten year old, a student of Sri Medhankara Vidhyalaya, Horana, had no way of requesting his parents pick him. He heads away for home alone and meets a tragic accident on the way. This is all his father had to say: “If he had a mobile phone, he could have asked me to come and pick him. Then this would have never have happened”

Sadly, the message will reach deaf ears. The story will never receive the same prominence from the biased media. Authorities, while equipping their own offspring with mobile phones, will continue to block the benefit of this easy mode of communication to rural and poor children.

It couldn’t be certainly the lack of evidence, that prevents them taking intelligent decisions, because we know for sure over 99% of the Bottom of the Pyramid teleusers see a mobile phone as a security device with over 71% saying it significantly improved their ability to act in an emergency. This is from LIRNEasia’s 2008 Teleuse at BoP survey. (See below) What more evidence they need?

The wisdom at the bottom which never made to top

“The challenge for mobile operators is to make a remittance service as simple as handing over the money and a slip, with hand-written transfer details, to a bank clerk,” said the study. On average, a Sri Lankan migrant sends home US $ 137 per month. The most common method of remittance is through the banking system. In addition, some either carried money home as cash, or sent cash or cheques, in the post. However, these methods were used by less than 25% of migrants. As much as 84% of Sri Lankan migrants had bank accounts. Over half of Sri Lankan recent migrants surveyed (54 %), also owned a mobile phone.

This line from the popular Sinhala song ‘Saroja’ (sung by the wife of a powerful minister of the current regime) tells it all. First it was for students, but now the government wants to extend the mobile phone ban for teachers too. Not a surprising move by a government that wants to block  ‘Adults Only’ films watched by…er, adults.

Reported Daily Mirror:

“I have heard that the Nuwara Eliya incident had taken place involving a teacher and the other incident was connected to a female student. Education Minister Susil Premajayantha has taken measures to prohibit the use of mobile phones at public schools. However, I think the rule must apply to both students and teachers. Hence, it is most appropriate if teachers also refrain from using mobile phones during school hours,” President Rajapaksa said.

The President expressed these views while addressing the ‘Nena Guna Weduma’ ceremony under the National Education Programme at Temple Trees to give away appointment letters to 415 graduate teachers by the Western Provincial Council.

Read the full story here.

The incident that triggered this move was the suicide of a fourteen year old girl of a leading school in Colombo, whose mobile phone, with personal information, has been confiscated by the prefects. We are bit confused why no ban on school ties – what the girl used to hang herself in the wash room. Please note: No international conspiracies to tarnish the image of the country have not been indicated so far.

Bangladesh did demonstrate herself as competitive in eight components, including lowest rates among all the countries surveyed with regards to monthly telephone charge and monthly gas charge.

However, it remained less competitive in most areas related to foreign investment, including container transportation, land price of industrial estate, internet connection fee, monthly internet fee, telephone installation fee, mobile phone subscription fee, and corporate income tax among others.

The report, however, highlighted high internet fees among these.

“Particularly, the Monthly Basic Payment for Broadband Internet Service in Bangladesh is continuously holding highest position among all the participating countries in this survey.”

How was the telecom market affected? In the same report, a figure shows how the subscriber base increased over time. However, the rate of growth declined in recent quarters. In 2007, the rate of growth was 9.9 percent; 2008 ended with a minus 0.3 percent growth. The average revenue per user went from USD 3.1 in the last quarter of 2007 to USD 2.58 during the last quarter of 2008.

Similarly in Sri Lanka, government has seen the mobile industry as an easy source of revenue through taxes and levies. There may be lessons for Sri Lanka from the counter-productive outcomes of Pakistan’s efforts to milk the golden mobile goose.

LIRNEasia’s T@BOP3 study conducted in 6 Asian countries indicated that only 38 percent of households at the bottom of the pyramid in Pakistan have access to mobile phones. There are consumers waiting to adopt mobile phones. Shouldn’t the government make efforts to make them available to them? Getting more people connected and taking a reasonable share of their payments as tax would be more productive than imposing taxes that bar them from becoming customers and deprive the government of tax revenues.

The PTA is to be applauded for doing these kinds of analyses. One hopes that the government of Pakistan will take remedial action to get telecom growth back on track. One hopes that other regulatory agencies will conduct and publish similar studies.

And wireless phone carriers might well start calling them something else entirely as they race to begin selling laptops with bundled data plans directly to consumers.

“We have been flying the carriers around the world,” said Michael Rayfield, the general manager of mobile products for Nvidia, one of many chip companies producing parts for these new laptops. “They all want to meet the manufacturers and come up with their own look and feel.”

A 30-person company called Mobinnova worked with Taiwanese manufacturing giant Foxconn for just four months to make what amounts to the thinnest, most power-efficient laptop for the carriers. Called the Elan, the Nvidia-based device can run for up to 24 days on a single charge if it is just playing music or run for 10 hours straight playing high-definition video.

Mike Holland, Mobinnova’s vice president for business development, said that one telecommunications company, which he declined to name, will start offering the product before the Christmas shopping season at a price of $49 to $99.

The full story.

About 100 delegates — from academia, industry and the financial and entrepreneurial worlds — participated in the event, which concluded Wednesday evening with a lively roundtable discussion that included Mr. Gore and Mr. Hart, as well as Ratan N. Tata, the chairman of the Indian carmaker Tata Group and the manufacturer of the new, low-priced Nano automobile, and H. Fisk Johnson, the chairman and chief executive of the household product giant, S.C. Johnson & Son.

Mr. Johnson, whose company was praised by Mr. Gore as “one of the most sustainable in the world,” chatted about S.C. Johnson’s development of natural insecticides in Rwanda and the company’s use of biofuels to power factories in Vietnam and Indonesia.

“Disruptive,” Mr. Hart said, invoking the buzzword of the evening.

Mr. Tata pointed to the mobile phone’s ubiquity in the developing world as an example of a disruptive, leapfrog technology (albeit not exactly a green one) that has proliferated in poorer nations, providing communications to millions of people in places where landline infrastructure remains sparse or nonexistent.

“When I was a kid, you waited seven years for a telephone connection,” he said.

Full story.

Prof. Juhnjuhnwala and Prof. Gonsalves lead team at IITM have already released the beta version of the “m-Health Survey”, a J2ME applet built on Java’s MIDP 2.0 and CLDC 1.1 standard application programing interfaces; thus any phone with MIDP and CLDC built can work the applet. The working model was demonstrated to the Panacea members. The J2ME applet stores the disease, symptom, and sign relationships in the mobile phone’s Record Management Storage (RMS) memory. This minimizes the number of messages passed over GPRS between the mobile phone and the web server. The challenge ahead is in adopting a dictionary that can ensure correct spelling of the health domain specific words. So far the applet has been tested on a Nokia 3110c, Sony Ericson s302c, Amoi A363, and Motorola.

RTBP will test EDXL/CAP as a standard for direct and cascading dissemination of health disease information back to the last-mile health workers. University of Alberta’s Gordon Gow is taking the lead in adopting the PHIN Guideline for Communication and Alerting health risk information. This element of the pilot will study interoperability between jurisdictions. It is quite likely that Agha Kan University in Karchi, Pakistan will join India and Sri Lanka in the RTBP. The three countries will provide a good platform for testing interoperability.

There is no clear cut classification as to where electronic delivery of health services is actually needed in the health sector. An aim of Panacea is to define a framework for clearly compartmentalizing the marriage between health services and ICT solutions. Researchers from Philippines, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Mongolia, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka are conducting 8 distinct projects where each project is piloted in 2 or 3 countries. LIRNEasia lead multipartner RTBP pilot shares commonalities and as a result will be closely associated with Panacea in terms of exchanging research knowledge.

It was confirmed that the study of information communication technology intervention cannot be measured only on morbidity and mortality with short term results. The proposition can be argued to even long term results because external forces that directly impact or create noise will distort the morbidity or motality results and not the tested e-Health solution; more so we would never know what the external forces are. Challenge lies in identifying the sufficient set of indicators to evaluate e-Health interventions. The initiative may even change present child mortality as an indicator to measure a country’s health sector performance to a set of realistic indicators.

RTBP work was presented at the meeting which took place at the Earl’s Regencey hotel, Kandy, Sri Lanka from 28 Jan – 03 Feb, 2009. The events were hosted by Aga Khan University and the local Panacea researcher Dr. Plitha Gunawardane.

Dialog Telekom PLC in collaboration with its partners Dialog University of Moratuwa Mobile Communications Research Laboratory and Microimage Technologies together with the Disaster Management Centre (DMC) of Sri Lanka launched Sri Lanka’s first ever mass alert warning system; the ‘Disaster and Emergency Warning Network’ (DEWN) yesterday under the patronage of Disaster Management and Human Rights Minister, Mahinda Samarasinghe.

Speaking on the launch of DEWN Group Chief Executive Officer, Dialog Telekom PLC, Dr. Hans Wijayasuriya said that “There are 10 million people in this country who have access to telecommunication and mobile services. Now the mobile has become a powerful tool which could be called as a ‘Digital Empowerment Device’ and our citizens are digitally empowered into the digital network”. Dr. Wijayasuriya went onto say that now one can even provide banking and other information services via a mobile phone unit adding that the Dialog News Alert service has now reached 350,000 subscribers.

DEWN is a system that was being tested by the Disaster Management Centre (DMC) to alert Dialog mobile users of potential disasters via a method called ‘Cell Broadcast’. Users only need to configure area information reception settings on their Dialog mobiles to receive the alerts issued. The DMC takes the responsibility to adequately verify any emergency situation and issue alerts. A Memorandum of Understanding was signed by Dialog Telekom PLC and Disaster Management Centre to start the DEWN. In a potential disaster scenario, the DMC will first use DEWN to alert emergency personnel on their individual phones, and public alerts will be issued only when a threat is adequately verified. In addition to alerts received on the mobile phones, specially designed DEWN remote alarms will also be used to alert nominated emergency personnel. Cell Broadcast is currently available only on the Dialog GSM network and not yet available on #G mode.

Addressing the gathering Minister of Disaster Management and Human Rights, Mahinda Samarasinghe said that “since December 26th 2004, when we lost 38,000 lives and when the tsunami caused serious damage to the assets of our economy and development of the country, the Government has moved into make Sri Lanka a safe place”. The Minister also highlighted the importance of private sector corporate social responsibility projects that enhance and enrich the lives of people. “Disaster prevention and mitigation in this country is essential for rapid economic strategy and sustainable economic development of Sri Lanka” Minister Samarasinghe said adding that the 24 hour operating Disaster Management Centre will be the focal point when sending the alerts via Dialog network.

Read the full story in Daily Mirror here.

Indonesia limits foreign ownership in the telecommunication sector to a maximum of 65 percent for mobile phone operators and 49 percent for fixed-line operators.

Two tender offers would begin concurrently in Indonesia and the United States at 7,388 rupiahs ($0.661) per share and would expire on Feb. 18, Qtel said.

“The Indonesian government has determined that Qtel’s total ownership will be limited to 65 percent of Indosat,” Qtel said in a statement.

“Guided by this ruling, Qtel is thus offering to acquire an additional stake of up to approximately 24.19 percent of Indosat, after taking into account its existing 40.81 percent indirect stake in Indosat,” Qtel said.

Qtel bought a stake in Indosat, the country’s second largest mobile phone operator, from Singapore Technology Telemedia for $1.35 billion in June, increasing its ownership of the company to 40.81 percent from around 10 percent.

Indonesia’s communications minister specified last year Qtel should not control more than 65 percent of Indosat and that it had to separate its mobile and fixed-line business in two years.

Read the full story in Reuters here.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said China’s biggest mobile operator, China Mobile, was awarded a license for TD-SCDMA, the domestically-developed 3G standard.

The other two main carriers, China Telecom and China Unicom, received licenses for the US-developed CDMA2000 and Europe’s WCDMA, respectively.

The 3G high-speed networks can handle faster data downloads, allowing handset users to make video calls and watch TV programs.

Read the full story in China Daily here.