Tag Archives: China
Mother of all memes
We at LIRNEasia grapple with the challenge of charting the influence of our research on policy in environments where the norm is not to attribute where ideas were taken from. One solution that we have tried is that of using identifiable memes in our communication, hoping that they will reappear in policy documents. The personal [...]
Submarine CLS: Internet’s slippery passage to India
All submarine cables connecting the Far East with Europe and Africa transit at India. It has made 12 submarine cables (six owned by consortiums and six privately-owned) hopping into 10 cable landing stations (CLS) at the Indian seashore. Voice and data traffic of 27 international long distance operators (ILDO) are processed through the 10 CLS. [...]
Excluding OTT players from a market = Trade restriction that is a violation of WTO rules
Just before WCIT, Hosuk Lee and I did a rush job that looked at the possibility that the ETNO-inspired efforts to extract rents from OTT players such as Facebook may violate GATS commitments. Now the issue has bubbled up on another front: When China and other nations block the websites of U.S. companies but the [...]
The clubs you avoid and the clubs you join
I have been studying how to make Internet affordable and resilient across the developing Asia. Excessive reliance on submarine cable is the bottleneck. My study shows how to overcome it by deploying fiber across the continent, exploiting the transcontinental highways. But the control-freak governments, attending WCIT 2012 conference at Dubai, have deepened the crises of [...]
China as a Galapagos of Innovation?
China is a mobile powerhouse. Chinese made Smartphones are spreading fast across Asia and Africa. Yet, where are Chinese developed apps? “The Chinese Internet market is so set apart from other countries that we inside the industry refer to it as the Galápagos Island syndrome,” said Kai Lukoff, the editor of TechRice, a China-focused technology [...]
Demographic time bomb
At LIRNEasia, we do not focus solely on ICTs. For some time, we’ve been looking at demographic structure as a factor. Both the recent Afghanistan and Bhutan Sector Performance Reviews contained sections on demography. The demographic time bomb, the increase in the aged population before a country has had time to get rich and establish [...]
Now, a smartphone gap between China and the US
Apparently a gap that cannot be bridged has opened up in smartphone sales thanks to sub USD200 smartphones from Huawei and others. let us be thankful the gap is only in smartphones. Smartphones are so popular here that it’s difficult to avoid seeing one, and in China, these devices are poised to become even more [...]
Internet users amount to forty percent of China’s population
For some time, we have been engaged in the task of improving the way Internet users are counted. We are in agreement with the ITU that the best way of counting Internet users is through demand-side surveys. According to reports, China conducts regular surveys on Internet use. Yet, the ITU does not use these data. [...]
All telecom network equipment is vulnerable?
Increasingly, there is talk that permitting Huawei to bid on telecom network contracts makes a country vulnerable to espionage and worse. The Economist has a well argued ripost. Well worth a read. The other reason for not banning Huawei is the dirty little secret that its foreign rivals strangely neglect to mention: just about everybody [...]
What do you call a monopoly in China?
A state-owned enterprise. But you cannot call a state-owned enterprise a monopoly. Not in China. Challenging the system, Mr. Zhang contends, has been the key to China’s economic success. Today, he says, that would mean reducing the party’s control over important sectors of the economy. Over the past decade, state companies have maintained and expanded [...]
Innovation and the state
We had the pleasure of engaging with an erudite politician at the inauguration of LIRNEasia’s principal capacity-building event, CPRsouth in Bangkok last week. Former Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, who used to teach economics at Thammasat U before he went into politics, had this to say, as reported in Bangladesh’s Daily Star, about innovation and the [...]
Targeted shutdowns of mobile networks in China
China is a big country. By definition, its ethnic conflicts are localized. The newest is Inner Mongolia. And the mobile networks are being shut down, only in the affected region: “First they shut down our Internet, then they interrupted our cellphone service and finally they imprisoned us at school,” said the student, an intense, foppishly [...]
Sri Lanka and Pakistan slide in BPO rankings; Bangladesh still not on the radar
The AT Kearney Global Services Location Index for 2011 is out. I seem to have missed the 2010 report, so comparing with 2009, which I did do a post on. India is still number 1 and China is number 2. No change. Thailand has slipped to 7 from 4, overtaken by Indonesia. Sri Lanka is [...]
China: Short of throwing the kill switch
Did China shut down the telecom system during the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989? There was no Internet to shut down back then. This time around, they seem to be adopting a gradualist response, according to NYT: The words “Jasmine Revolution,” borrowed from the successful Tunisian revolt, were blocked on sites similar to Twitter and on [...]
Doing telecom business in China
Talk about coincidence. Just yesterday, on the train to Brussels, I just finished answering a series of questions sent by Voice & Data, the leading ICT industry publication in South Asia. This included a question on whether it would be possible for Indian telcos to do business in China. My answer was “China is a [...]
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