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.  ]]> http://lirneasia.net/2009/05/findings-from-broadband-qose-study-published-by-economic-times-india/feed/ 0 http://lirneasia.net/2009/03/4003/ http://lirneasia.net/2009/03/4003/#comments Mon, 30 Mar 2009 09:29:39 +0000 Chanuka Wattegama http://lirneasia.net/?p=4003 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 [...]]]>

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 a helping hand to start a phone card selling/reloading centre. It is not charity. It will be the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid.

What did we learn?

1. 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.
2. 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 speeds and to keep that promise. Looks like it is working.
3. Dhaka: Prices seems to have dropped but so does the quality. So after all it is not such great news.

That is not all, there is an interesting piece of information useful for any mobile broadband user in Colombo, but we leave the readers to find it themselves. The full report is here.

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.

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?

‘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.

BSNL should be made to share its fibre and access networks, Samarajiva said. With shared infrastructure and innovation in marketing, costs can be brought down further, he said. Moreover, telecom companies should also shift their focus from calculating average revenue per user (Arpu) to average margin per user (Ampu), he added.

Also at:  http://asia.tmcnet.com/news/2007/12/26/3184529.htm
http://in.news.yahoo.com/071226/203/6ovtq.html
http://in.biz.yahoo.com/071226/203/6ovva.html

Book also discussed at Yahoo Tech Group forum.

‘Fact or fiction: Telecommunications in Asia By Liffy Thomas’ – Ergo (the Hindu, India)

At a time when GSM operators, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) and the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) are at an imbroglio over spectrum allocation, Prof Rohan Samarajiva’s book, “ICT Infrastructure in Emerging Asia: Policy and Regulatory Roadblocks”, makes for a timely read. In Chennai for the launch of the book, Samarajiva, Executive Director of LIRNEasia and former Director General of Telecommunications in Sri Lanka, spoke to Liffy Thomas.

BOOK EXTRACT: ‘Subsidising The Smart Way’ – Business World Magazine (India)The Latin American experience holds lessons for the development of rural telephony in Asia, says Harsha De Silva

The supply of telephony has traditionally been skewed towards the urban affluent as opposed to the rural poor. The literature describes this bias as having been caused by a ‘market efficiency gap’ and an ‘access gap’. The market efficiency gap is the difference between what markets achieve under existing conditions and what they can achieve if barriers are removed. This gap can be bridged through effective competition, private provision of services, and market-oriented policies and regulations that create a level playing field for new entrants. The access gap refers to people and places that remain beyond limits of the market due to inadequate income levels or its skewed distribution. Bridging this gap needs subsidies to encourage service providers to enter these areas.

‘Policies for ICT’ – New India Express (Chennai, India) 

WHILE the common perception remains that India has the lowest mobile phone tariffs, other countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have lower tariffs than India, Rohan Samarajiva, executive director, Lirne Asia, said on Tuesday.

Talking about his new book ICT Infrastructure in Emerging Asia – Policy and Regulatory Roadblocks, he said, when compared to all these countries, India’s cost is much higher.

The Deccan Chronicle, Chennai, 16.12.07:

 Policies and regulations are the main bottlenecks blocking the development of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure in India, according to Prof Ashok Jhujhunwala, Telecom and Networks (TeNet) Group, IIT, Madras.

Releasing the book ‘ICT Infrastructure in Emerging Asia: Policy and Regulatory Roadblocks’, a collection of articles edited by Rohan Samarajiva and Ayesha Zainudeen, ICT experts, here on Sunday, Prof Jhunjhunwala said any technological problems associated with ICT could be sorted out by scientists within two to three years. “But the policy-makers and regulators fail to move ahead with the times. We are living in an era when things which were socially desirable once have become commercial to the core,” the professor said. He pointed out that ICT has the potential of helping developing countries tackle a wide range of health, social, and economic problems.

“While urban India is marching rapidly ahead, rural India is being left behind. We have to use ICT to accelerate the growth of rural India,” said Dr Jhunjhunwala. Elaborating on the pace of growth of ICT, Dr Jhunjhunwala said the next two years will see payments through mobile phones catching up all over the country.

“Instead of going to ATM centres or Banks, you can have cash transactions through your mobile phones,” he said. Dr Samarajiva said the book was a step forward in identifying the reasons for under-connectivity in emerging Asia. “The book itself is an introduction, not a conclusion. It reports the findings of a cutting edge demand-side survey of telecom use at the ‘bottom of a pyramid’ in India and Sri Lanka,” said Dr Samarajiva, a former director general of Sri lanka Telecommunications.

He said there is enough scope to bring down telecom charges. “It is the outdated policies of the governments in the region which are playing havoc with the communication revolution. This is aggravating the digital divide which will lead to major catastrophe,” he said.

The publication of the book was co-funded by the IDRC and Social Science Research Council (SSRC).

More information on the book can be found on the book page.

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.

More Information 

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 is with SMS or Cell Broadcasting the message must be unambiguous and in all local languages. Presented proposed that Mobile operators and handset manufacturers investigate the options of building onboard software for decoding CAP messages to reduce the message pay load, adopt globally accepted or intuitive symbolic/graphical schemes to communicate the alert messages independent of language, and embed natural language processors in handsets for users to select language of choice. The paper further proposes an optimal set of CAP elements to transport the message and a enumeration based strategy to encode and decode the CAP messages.

WWRF Presentation – Optimizing CAP on SMS based GSM devices

Paper — Challenges of Optimizing Common Alerting Protocol for SMS based GSM Devices in LM-HWS in Sri Lanka

WWRF IITM Report

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.

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.