The studies are ongoing. But we now have the ongoing research being implemented as a commercial service:

Sri Lanka’s top celco Dialog Telekom is offering a trading platform based on short message services (SMS) that can help farmers to sell their produce and create a forward market for agriculture produce, officials said.
“The Dialog TradeNet agricultural trading platform service is offered free of charge to users, but normal call charges and SMS charges will apply,” Hans Wijayasuriya, chief executive at Dialog Telekom, said.

“We want to penetrate the entire farming community with this service.”

More details will follow.

(Photograph courtesy of Sameera Wijerathna, Dialog Telekom PLC)

If you believe something, no evidence is necessary, they say, while if you don’t know evidence is adequate. So we are not surprised if users do not agree, but that is what evidence shows. Test results from Feb 2008 and Feb 2009 round shows a clear improvement, when accessing international servers. The broken lines are for 2008, the unbroken for 2009. SLT ADSL and Dialog WiMax were tested both times.

This was one of the ‘stories’ we presented at the Public Seminar ‘Broadband Quality War: Are you a Winner or a Loser?’ – jointly organized by LIRNEasia and IT sectional Committee of the Institution of Engineers. Prof. Timothy Gonsalves of IIT Madras, R. Thirumurthy of Midas Communication Technologies with representatives from Dialog and Mobitel joined me in making presentations.

Presentation by Timothy Gonsalves

Presentation by R. Thirumurthy

Presentation by Chanuka Wattegama

Presentation by Dialog Telekom

Watch this space for the other presentation slides.

(Click on image for a better view)

How far onshore rural BPOs cater to the needs of their clients? It might not exactly be toy manufacturing outsourced to rural China, but close. The connectivity issues still exist, and capacity building too remains a challenge. The good news is in spite of all that things do happen.

Isura Seneviratne, 22, runs OnTime Technologies at Mahavilachchiya – the first rural BPO in Sri Lanka, born as a joint effort of Horizon Lanka Academy and FARO (Foundation for Advancing Rural Opportunities). Isuru and its first manager Nirosh did the business plan. Trained in Laos and India for BPO work, Isuru knows the nuts and bolts of the game. The operation is still lean, only 8 seats against 25 – the expect target within the first year of operation. Cannot blame because the business had to face the hard challenge of not only building capacity but also pulling legs by different parties. Fortunately the internal politics is now over with the bold step by Lovina Charles, a key donor of the Horizon project at Mahavilachchiya expressing her full backing for the BPO.

At OnTime technologies an operator earns Rs. 8,000 (USD 72) minimum per month, while the highflyers take something like Rs. 13,000 (USD 120) home. Assuming a reasonable PPP ratio this is equivalent to earning USD 240 – 300 in Colombo.

OnTime Technologies offer data entry, data verification, data Indexing, scanning, web designing and graphic designing services. Isuru is proud to mention his clients, John Keells Holdings and Dialog Telekom, two conglomerates. His next goal is a project too ambitious. From Mahavilachchiya Isuru and his team is going to handle the daily issues for a hotel network.

Isuru is not alone in the game.

Jayantha Wickramaratne of Panamura Nenasala, Embilipitita (a telecenter setup under the World Bank funded e-Sri Lanka program) provides e-commerce services using the e-Bay model through the site http://www.ecseva.lk. Advertisements placed by service providers are made available to the large base of site’s users. Anyone who has a job too can place an advertisement which will be then offered to a bidder through a competitive bidding process.

Selvaratnam Sri Kanthan of Koslanda Nenasala too runs a rural BPO service for local and international clients. Partnered with NLingua Services of New Delhi, a voice transcription and translation service, his Nanasala employs Koslanda residents to translate and transcribe audio files from Tamil or Sinhala into English, or vice versa. Web Design is another service he offers.

This does not mean everything runs perfectly. There are so many issues to be addressed. (For example Isuru can do a better job with a link of higher capacity than his present 256 kbps one) Still these courageous and innovative young men and women bring us hope – in difficult times.

“Sri Lanka’s leading mobile operator is creating a broadband revolution. By leveraging HSPA mobile broadband technology, it is bringing affordable access to all levels of society, from the wealthiest businesses to the poorest villages.”

Thus starts the GSMA case study on the Dialog mobile broadband. It is just four pages and in easily readable format – but still enough new stuff, that makes it a worthy read.

Selected extracts:

• Dialog estimates that the rural economy generates $350 million per month compared to $110 million in the urban economy.
• Dialog’s success lies in pioneering the low ARPU business model. Eighty-seven percent of the operator’s 5 million mobile customers are prepaid with an ARPU of less than US$4.
• In 2007, the expanding nationwide network was supercharged with HSPA, giving users access to the internet and
  multimedia content at maximum downloads speeds of 1.8Mbps. This has subsequently been upgraded to 14.4Mbps.
• Currently (Dialog is) evaluating HSPA Evolved to bring downloads to 42Mbps.
• Dialog has roughly 120,000 3G customers, around 30,000 of which connecting their laptops and desktops to the internet with HSPA modems and data cards.

The full paper can be downloaded from here.

Similar case stidies are available here.

Of all the South Asian countries, it is best positioned to exploit the potential of cell broadcasting both for early warning and for commercial applications. In this light, LIRNEasia was pleased to be invited to conduct a scoping study on cell broadcasting for both public-service and commercial purposes by the Telecom Authority of the Maldives. As part of that activity, we organized, in collaboration with TAM, a workshop with the participation of Mark Wood (CEASa International) and Harsha Purasinghe (MicroImage), two people who have worked on implementing (not just talking about) cell broadcasting for the past few years.

Mark talked about the change in the environment for cell broadcasting following the US rule that any mobile device that was incapable of delivering public warning would have to be labeled as such and the greater enthusiasm displayed by the EU following the successful trials in the Netherlands. Harsha described the innovative work done by his team together with Dialog Telekom and the University of Moratuwa on developing DEWN. The commercial applications of cell broadcasting (location-based) services are also seen to be quite significant and attractive in and of themselves.

LIRNEasia was very pleased to see the high levels of enthusiasm among the participants and is confident that with timely follow through the Maldives can become the Asian leader in providing security to both its citizens and its guests through effective early warning.

Informed consumers exercising consumer sovereignty are the basis of competitive marketplaces.  If they cannot figure out the prices they are paying, how can they be sovereign?

The war against porn continues – at full throttle. We are just twelve kilo meters away from porn-free net. Stay tuned. You may hear the good news anytime.

Meanwhile ‘National Child Protection Authority of Sri Lanka’, which claims keeping an eye on your child even when you are sleeping, wants to keep an eye on your mobile too. According to what Lakbima published today, you are not supposed to receive any porn material through SMS (sic – guess this should be MMS) or host any porn sites in your mobile. (We did not even know this was possible. All these days we thought websites are hosted on high capacity web servers, not on mobile phones. Guess this will not be good news for the server manufacturers.)

So if you host any porn site in your mobile please delete is before the Child Protection Authority does the honours for you. They are certainly not alone. The technical expertise and financial support comes from Dialog Telekom, who will provide a dedicated number so that the users can inform if they receive any pornographic material via SMS MMS (or about any porn sites they host in mobiles).

Our sympathises are always with the poor Sri Lankan bureaucrats, to whom life has become nightmarish ever since the boost in mobile usage. It is not an easy task introducing new policies on monthly basis to fight the negative impact of mobiles. The trouble you take to protect us from this little polluter of environment and minds is magnanimous and we will never forget that!

Such wise words were not always heeded.

Four new levies, reported Financial Times today, will come into force this month under the Environmental Conservation Levy Act No. 8 of 2008.

All communication towers will be charged Rs 50,000, according to the Central Environmental Authority (CEA) Chairman Udaya Gammanpila, who explained it was done to ‘induce telecommunication companies to share the towers’.

Sharing telecom towers is good, but if Mr. Chairman thinks that happens just by forcing them to pay for erecting towers, he is wrong. Had cost been the issue, sharing would have already happened, given the high cost of tower erection – from leasing the land to bribing authorities of all levels. Further if the CEA’s concern was reducing the numbers it could have been done more effectively working together with Telecommunication Regulatory Authority of Sri Lanka (TRCSL). That is how it happens in other countries. They could have learnt from the recent attempts by Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory commission.

Perhaps TRCSL is too busy with monitoring porn. So this will levy be eventually paid by the mobile and CDMA subscribers.

If that is not enough, mobile phones will further be levied two percent of their monthly bills. (Even without this mobile users pay 26 cents as tax for every Rs. 1 usage – the ratio among the highest in the world) The funds such generated will supposedly be used to build an e-waste recycling plant. Says CEA Chairman: “Currently we do not have such a facility and users dispose of their old mobile phones improperly, causing damage to the environment.”

We anticipate CEA Chairman to be better informed than we are in environmental matters. All we know is used mobile phones are not an environmental concern in Sri Lanka. Recycling firms confirm it is only rarely they find a mobile phone discarded. When Dialog Telekom initiated an island-wide drive to collect used mobiles (with attractive cash prices) they could not gather even a hundred.

So we can only assume if at all another recycle plant is needed, it is for the other forms of e-waste. Parts of all types of electronic goods including televisions, radios, washing machines, refrigerators, air conditioners, sound systems and computers are being added to the environment in bulk. We fully agree. That is the environmental concern.

However almost all of these are luxury goods while mobile and CDMA phones are increasingly used by the poor. So why should poor pay for clearing the e-waste of the rich? Why not impose an environmental levy on all electronic goods?

May CEA Chairman please explain?

Dialog 3G will deliver the unique communication channel of video calling to customers in Jaffna who will now be able to have face to face conversations with their loved ones locally and internationally.

Read the full story in Daily Mirror here.

The recipients were Dr. Hans Wijesooriya of Dialog Telekom, Leisha De Silva of Sri Lanka Telecom, Harry Jayewardene of Distilleries and Aitken Spence, Sumithra Gunasekara of John Keells, Rajendra Thyagaraja of Hatton National Bank, Ravi Dias of Commercial Bank, Eran Wickremerathne of NDB Bank, Nustanfer Ali Khan of Ceylon Tobacco and Thila De Soysa of Bukit Darah.

Source: Colombopage

Do mobile phones pollute the environment? Sri Lanka’s Environment Minister Champika Ranawaka thinks so. That was why he wants to impose a so called ‘environment tax’ on mobiles, (in fact all phones, but the above newspaper article focuses on mobiles) at two points, when you purchase it and use it. This is on top of the rest of the tax components the mobile users already have to pay.

No information to that mobile usage is a serious threat to Sri Lanka’s environment. Whatever the little information we possess suggest the opposite. E-waste recycling companies claim the number of mobile phones added to e-waste is negligible. When Dialog Telekom initiated a well publicised effort to collect used mobile phones, they could collect not even 100 – much less than their original target of 1 million. So the bottom-line is wherever the phones end up not many are disposed to environment. 

Over-taxing mobile usage is not wise. That is what GSMA found in 2005, in its famous study in 101 countries titled ‘Tax and the Digital Divide’. These were some of the findings.

• On average, tax accounts for 24.8% of total handset costs and 45 countries (nearly half of those surveyed) impose specific import duties on handsets;
• Reducing mobile specific taxes and general consumer taxes such as VAT leads to substantial increases in mobile penetration and usage;
• Increased mobile penetration boosts economic activity. In developing countries a 10% increase in penetration leads to a 1.2% increase in the annual growth rate in GDP; and
• Taxation of mobile consumers in East Africa is almost twice the 17.4% global average, potentially limiting mobile expansion in the region and the associated benefits

We hope Minister Champika Ranawaka read the full GSM report (can be downloaded from here) and if he has not done yet, this piece by Rohan Samarajiva to LBO too: What is best for Sri Lanka’s environment: Tax or incentives?

Indian telecom giant Bharti Airtel, which had announced its entry into the Sri Lankan mobile phone sector with much fanfare last year, is experiencing delays and may well be re-drawing its investment plans for the island country, says a Sri Lankan telecommunication expert.

Rohan Samarajeewa, former head of Sri Lanka’s Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (TRC), told IANS that while there was no doubt that Bharti Airtel was committed to operating in Sri Lanka, it had altered its timetable and could well be scaling down its original investment plans.

The reasons for the delay in starting the operations were in the realm of speculation, Samarajeewa said. But he did point to a possibility of difficulties in getting frequencies from the TRC, as it is generally recognized that the allotment of frequencies tends to be “highly politicised” in Sri Lanka.

The parent company in India could also be changing its priorities as regards capital allocations, in the context of the growing challenges in the more lucrative Indian domestic market, Samarajeewa said.

“Even assuming that the mobile phone market in Sri Lanka is 10 million, it is still only the size of a metropolis in India. It is therefore possible that Bharti Airtel is looking at some of the Indian states with greater interest,” he said.

In 2007, Bharti Airtel had set up a Sri Lankan subsidiary, Bharti Airtel Lanka Pvt Ltd., got a license to provide 2G and 3G services in collaboration with China’s Huawei Technologies, announced an investment of $200 million and began to recruit a large staff. The services were to begin by 2007 end. This subsequently got postponed to early 2008. But, as yet, there are no signs of an early start.

“When it announced its entry, I expected Bharti Airtel to literally slaughter the existing players. But given the recent changes in the price structure here, and the intense competition in the field, the Indian company will have to be quite creative if it is to be more than just a minor player,” Samarajeewa said.

The market is small and crowded. The fixed line and mobile phone penetration in Sri Lanka is very high. Forty to 50 percent of the households in the island (excluding the war-affected north and east) have access to a phone. Out of a total population of 20 million, six million have mobile phones. With the recently announced price reductions, the user-base is expected to rise to 10 million, or half the total population of the country.

There are already four players in the field. Among them, Dialog Telekom, a unit of Telecom Malaysia, has been the leader, controlling 60 percent of the market. Dialog has enjoyed brand loyalty for a considerable length of time throughout Sri Lanka, and is, therefore, no pushover.

Bharti Airtel would have to come up with innovative packages to attract the bottom rungs of the socio-economic ladder, an area of rapid growth in the foreseeable future, Samarajeewa pointed out. While price will be of the highest importance for those in the bottom-end of the social scale, technical qualities will be a clincher among the upper strata of society.

Asked for the reasons for the delay in starting operations, Bharti Airtel Lanka’s CEO, Amali Nanayakkara, said her company had very stringent requirements in regard to the infrastructure and that it would not start operations until all the requirements were met.

But she denied that there were any difficulties in getting official clearances. The setting up of the network was also proceeding satisfactorily. The company was “very happy” with the cooperation of the Sri Lankan authorities, and the pace of the work was also “very good”, Nanayakkara told IANS.

As for the price factor, she said that it was nothing new. “It was there right from the time we came here,” she said.

—

More coverage available at:

AOL News

Kerala.com

NDTV.com

Lankaeverything.com

Elakiri.com 

China’s mobile network: a big brother surveillance tool? – LANKA BUSINESS ONLINE

“We know who you are, but also where you are,” said the CEO of China Mobile Communications Corporation, Wang Jianzhou, whose company adds six million new customers to its network each month and is already the biggest mobile group in the world by users.

He was explaining how the company could use the personal data of its customers to sell advertising and services to them based on knowledge of where they were and what they were doing.

When pressed about the privacy and security implications of this, he added: “We can access the information and see where someone is, but we never give this information away … only if the security authorities ask for it.”

The movement of mobile phone users can be tracked because they connect to local base stations, giving a trail that can only be accessed in most democratic countries by security officials under strict conditions.

Mobile phones can also be easily tapped.

Powered by ScribeFire.

The session, moderated by Prof. Rohan Samarajiva, presented findings and analysis within a 90-minute session divided into two mini-sessions on technology and community. Mr. Michael De Soyza of Dialog Telekom and Mrs. Mala Rao of WorldSpace Corporation (India) presented their respective technologies piloted in the project. In the second mini-session on community, Dr. Vinya Ariyaratne, Executive Director, Sarvodaya discussed the Sarvodaya approach to making communities disaster resilient. Natasha Udu-gama and Nuwan Waidyanatha presented analysis of the findings.

“Making Communities Disaster Resilient” – Rapporteur Report

Moderator Presentation | Rohan Samarajiva
WorldSpace Corporation | Mala Rao
Dialog Telekom | Michael De Soyza
Sarvodaya Approach to Disaster Risk Reduction | Dr. Vinya Ariyaratne
Training and Community Organization: Key Messages | Natasha Udu-gama
Findings and Conclusions | Nuwan Waidyanatha

When it comes to using phones, the film says, people at the bottom of the income pyramid are no different from anyone else; they value the enhanced personal security, including emergency communications, and social networking benefits. Increasingly, poor people are not content with just using public phones or shared access phones (belonging friends or family). They see a utility and social value of having their own phones.

These insights emerged from LIRNEasia’s large representative sample survey of telephone use at BOP in India, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand. The survey conducted by ACNielsen, a multinational market research company, confirmed some known trends, whilst challenging conventional wisdom on several fronts. According to LIRNEasia Lead Economist Dr. Harsha de Silva, the findings completely debunked the myth that 50 per cent of people had never used a telephone.

Part 1

Scroll down for Part 2

The survey also found that men and women use phones pretty much the same way at the bottom of the pyramid. Says Ayesha Zainudeen, Senior Researcher, LIRNEasia: “There are almost no differences between men and women — except in the case of Pakistan, where you have the cultural factors playing in.”

The survey, supported by Canada’s International Development Research Centre, IDRC, has been well received by telecom operators and industry regulators across Asia.
 
The film features an interview with the head of Sri Lanka’s leading mobile phone company, Dialog Telekom, who acknowledges using survey findings to further customise products to suit aspirations at the bottom of the pyramid.                                                                              

The film will be premiered at the Third Global Knowledge Conference (GK3) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, from 11 to 13 December 2007. It will be part of an interactive quiz that LIRNEasia and TVE Asia Pacific will jointly present during the global event, expected to attract 2,000 participants.                                                                                                  

Focusing on the theme “Emerging People, Emerging Markets, Emerging Technologies”, GK3 will connect those in governments, business, civil society and academia engaged in using ICT tools for meeting the real world’s needs — to reduce poverty, increase incomes, create safer communities, create sustainable societies and support youth enterprise, etc.
                                                                                                                                                           The interactive quiz will be conducted by TVEAP Director Nalaka Gunawardene, who counts many years of experience in broadcast quiz shows. He will be joined by LIRNEasia’s research staff to provide the live audience with interesting insights into the wide-ranging survey.

The telecom industry believes that the next billion phone subscribers will come mostly from the emerging markets. Therefore, understanding tele-use at the bottom of the pyramid becomes very important.

As with all TVEAP films, Teleuse@BOP will be available to broadcast, civil society and educational users without a license fee.

Both LIRNEasia and TVE Asia Pacific are members of the Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP), conveners of the GK3 platform.

Part 2