Tag Archives: Chennai
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Findings from Broadband QoSE study published by Economic Times, India
Findings from LIRNEasia’s Broadband Quality of Service Experience (QoSE) study have been published in The Economic Times, India.
Broadband quality of service offered by fixed wireline operators in non-metro areas of Tamil Nadu is three times better than in the metro circles of Chennai and Bangalore, a study conducted by IIT-Madras has shown…telecommunications and computer Netwroks group of IIT-M, has conducted tests on broadband quality of service in Chennai and RoTN circles as part of a project by Asian telecom policy thinktank LIRNEasia.
Read the full article here.
Sri Lanka: Bottom of the Pyramid phone lady
Not many are familiar with ‘line rooms’ in Sri Lanka’s estates. Fewer have ever visited one. These are the dwellings of the labourers – descendants of the migrants brought here by British planters from in nearby Madras state in India staring from 1827 to work in estates for meager salaries under austere conditions. Human development conditions have significantly improved since then, but some of them still call a 4 m x 4 m room with a smaller kitchen ‘home’.
Meet Parameshvari. She lives in one such room with her elderly mother. She is physically disabled – something common in estates for reasons unknown; believed to be the impact of chemical fertilizers washed off to water resources. She may look younger, but is 23 years old.
This is her shop, where she sells sweets and phone calls. Mobile proliferation has made public phones less popular, but in an area mobile signals are hardly incessant she still finds enough business. She is not worried about the competition from the growing mobile industry as she does not know about it. She has hardly stepped out of the home. She may not necessarily lose her job, if mobile firms are bit considerate to give her ..read more
LIRNEasia’s Broadband Quality of Service Experience (QoSE) Testing – Feb 2009 results out!
In the third round, LIRNEasia has extended the testing to one more location. With that we have tested two packages in New Delhi (MTNL and AirTel), two in Chennai (BSNL and AirTel), five in Colombo (SLT ADSL, Dialog WiMax, Dialog 3G, Dialog 3G Unlimited and Mobitel Zoom 890) and two in Dhaka (SKYbd and Sirius). A strenuous task for five teams, no doubt, who took readings at different times staring from 8 am and went up to 11.00 pm (some had to spend nights at offices) but results are worth the effort.
What did we learn?
Broadband users in Colombo should not complain. They do have excellent choices. In terms of actual speed they are better off than counterparts in Dhaka, Chennai and New Delhi. Hold on, there is a hitch. They rarely get what is being promised; operators seem to over promise and under deliver. Indian operators, as seen from test results from Chennai and New Delhi, while not promising sun and moon, deliver what they do and sometimes even more. That is what we call ‘Ethical Advertising’. Indian Telecom Regulator’s intervention can hardly be overlooked. In January 2008 Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) directed the operators to specify the minimum ..read moreLIRNEasia to release T@BOP3 findings across India
Findings from the Teleuse at the bottom of the pyramid (T@BOP3) will be released at a meeting organized with the leadership of the Cellular Operators’ Association of India (COAI) on 10 February 2009. This will be followed by media interactions in Mumbai and Chennai. Ayesha Zainudeen, Harsha de Silva and Rohan Samarajiva will present at the events.
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.
Broadband: Customers in Colombo and Chennai get more or less the same speeds, but the promises vary widely
The download speeds that customers get in Chennai, Colombo and Dhaka are not very different, if you carefully examine the results of the October 2009 results of broadband QOSe using the Ashokatissa methodology jointly developed by IIT Madras and LIRNEasia. What differs is the level of truth in advertising. In Sri Lanka, everybody is lying. In India, they are closer to the truth.
The difference is regulation. In India, the regulator is proactive on this issue; in Sri Lanka, the regulator only worries about things like porn and imaginary towers. We cannot mandate truth in advertising; only engage in friendly moral suasion. In other words, we will try to shame the operators into calling their products by the right names: 512 Kbps instead of 2Mbps would be a start?
Coverage for LIRNEasia book
Click on the links to see the full articles covering LIRNEasia’s book, ICT Infrastructure in Emerging Asia: Policy and Regulatory Roadblocks.
‘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.
CPRSouth2 in Chennai
The second conference of CPRsouth2: ‘Empowering rural communities through ICT policy and research’, commenced on December 15, 2007 in Chennai, India. The three-day conference is being held in association with the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras’s (IIT-M) Rural Technology and Business Incubator (RTBI).
The events also include pre- and post-conference tutorials on December 14 and 18, 2007 and the second meeting of the CPRsouth Board.
Dialog/U-of-Moratuwa/Microimage Early Warning Innovations used in HazInfo presented at WWRF
Paper titled: Challenges of Optimizing Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) for SMS based GSM Devices in Last-Mile Hazard Warnings in Sri Lanka (authors N. Waidyanatha – LIRNEasia, D. Dias – University of Moratuwa, and H. Purasinghe – Microimage) was presented at the 19th Meeting of the Wireless World Research Forum (WWRF), in Chennai, India, 5-7 November, 2007. The paper was discussed in Working Group 1 – Human Perspective and Service Concepts (WG1).
LIRNEasia advocated Community-based Last-Mile Hazard Warning System pilot research (HazInfo project) field tested two GSM Terminal Devices: J2ME applet embedded Trilingual (Sinhala, Tamil, & English) mobile phone and GSM module/microcontroller based Remote Alarm Device (RAD). These two devices were developed as part of the Disaster and Emergency Warning Network (DEWN) under the umbrella of Dialog Telekom in collaboration with the University of Moratuwa located Dialog Mobile Communications Research Laboratory and the Microimage Mobile Communication Software Company. The paper discusses the potential and the shortcomings of CAP messaging with the use of SMS in a GSM environment as well as makes recommendations for future research and development.
The WWRF WG1 was made aware of the pragmatic issues of adopting CAP for Public Warning; whether it ..read more
LIRNEasia researcher at Wireless World Research Forum Meeting
Paper titled ‘Wireless Mesh Networking as a means of connecting rural communities: advantages, constrains and challenges – an analysis based on a case study from rural Sri Lanka’ co-authored by Chanuka Wattegama (LIRNEasia) and Rehana Wijesinghe (Enterprise Technology) has been accepted to be presented at the Wireless World Research Forum Meeting to be held 5-7 November, Chennai, India.
The objectives of this paper are to discuss the appropriateness of Wireless Mesh Networking in a rural environment in empowering the community, the design and implementation challenges and how they were addressed, related policy issues including the unlicensing of 2.4 GHz and 5.1 GHz bands and explore the possibilities of replicating the Mahavilachchiya model.
WWRF (http://www.wireless-world-research.org) is a global organisation, founded in August 2001 and now having over 140 members from five continents, representing all sectors of the mobile communications industry and the research community. The objective of the forum is to formulate visions on strategic future research directions in the wireless field, among industry and academia, and to generate, identify, and promote research areas and technical trends for mobile and wireless system technologies.
The full paper will be available shortly.
CPRsouth2: Empowering rural communities through ICT policy and research – December 15-17, 2007 in Chennai, India
LIRNEasia, in association with the TeNeT Group and RTBI of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras, is organizing the second CPRsouth conference, in Chennai, India from December 15-17, 2007. The conference aims to provide a forum for senior, junior and mid-career scholars to meet face-to-face and exchange ideas, establish networking opportunities and improve the quality of their scholarly work, in order to facilitate the long-term objective of fostering the next generation of active scholars and in-situ experts capable of contributing to ICT policy and regulatory reform in the region.
Please check the Call for Abstracts and Young Scholar Awards to see how you may participate in this event and join an emerging community of scholars committed to improving the lives of people in Asia through information and communication technology.
Visit the CPRsouth2 conference page for more information.
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