“By this initiative, we hope to give last mile access to people living in remote parts of the island,” USAID Acting Mission Director for Sri Lanka, Richard Edwards told reporters.
“The kiosk will be powered through broadband technology, giving people high speed internet access to expand their knowledge, their education, or to look up new markets or technologies to produce goods and services.”
The project brings together Sri Lanka’s biggest mobile phone operator Dialog Telekom, equipment vendor Qualcomm, software giant Microsoft, the National Development Bank and Lanka Orix Leasing Company, who have each chipped in by way of cash or kind.
Within the next two months, the project hopes to open Easy Seva centres in Anuradhapura, Dambulla, Habarana, Rikillagaskoda, Weeraketiya, Nuwara Eliya, Tissamaharama, Nawalapitiya, Kekirawa, Devinuwara,…
Tag Archive for 'Dialog Telekom'Page 2 of 2
LIRNEasia’s Mobile Benchmarks (South Asia and Southeast Asia) and Broadband Benchmarks Report for October 2008 has been released. Click HERE for more information.
Serving Sri Lanka: Indian Ocean tsunami warning capabilities improving
Addressable satellite radio sets were found to be the best alerting technology of the community disaster warning pilot project conducted by LIRNEasia and Sarvodaya. Java enabled mobile phones which has a wake up siren came next. The GSM based remote alarm device developed locally by Dialog Telekom, MicroImage and University of Moratuwa followed closely. It has both light and siren.Findings of this project on learning how information-communication technologies and community based training can help in tsunami and other disaster situations had been discussed by community leaders and international experts at a workshop on “Sharing Knowledge on Disaster Warning with a Focus on Community-Based Last-Mile Warning Systems” at the Sarvodaya Headquarters in Moratuwa recently. Difficulties had been experienced…
Informa:
TM doubles international budget
Telekom Malaysia (TM) has earmarked to spend MYR8 billion (US$2.3 billion) this year expanding its international mobile businesses in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, which is considerably more than the MYR2.8 billion it spent on its overseas units last year. TM chief executive Datuk Abdul Wahid Omar said TM’s foreign operations are expected to make 30% of group revenue this year, compared with 25% in 2006. However, the group is planning to trim its 87% stake in Sri Lankan mobile operator Dialog Telekom to not less than 80%, Wahid is quoted as saying. He said the group has been approached by several local and international investors to sell shares in Dialog.
Pasted below is a communication from Harsha Purasinghe of MicroImage that may be of interest to readers of this website.
“We are pleased to inform you all that Dialog Telekom launched the Sinhala & Tamil Mobile Browser and their Content Portal “SINHALANTHAYA” during New Year week. The browser can be downloaded by visiting http://www.dialogwap.com using your mobile and going into Application Download Area. This is the 1st ever launch of most successful Unicode compliant browser application. This application runs on wide range of phones starting from entry level low end Java Hand Sets, High End Java Hand Sets, Microsoft Windows Mobile Hand Sets and Black Berries.”
The findings of a pilot project on learning how information-communication technologies and community-based training can help in responding to disasters such as tsunamis were discussed by community leaders and international experts at a workshop on “SHARING KNOWLEDGE ON DISASTER WARNING, WITH A FOCUS ON COMMUNITY-BASED LAST–MILE WARNING SYSTEMS” held on March 28th and 29th, 2007 at the Sarvodaya headquarters in Moratuwa.
These finding ranged from the difficulties experienced in communicating disaster warnings to villages when mobile GSM and fixed CDMA telecom networks were not functional due to conflict conditions to the importance of not leaving newspapers on top of sensitive electronic equipment which can overheat and shut down as a result. In terms of the five communication technologies that were evaluated across multiple criteria, the addressable…
Report on the 11th LIRNE.NET Executive Training Course on Regulation, 25 February – 3 March 2007, conducted by LIRNEasia and CONNECTasia Forum Pte.Ltd.
Rohan Samarajiva, Course Director
The 11th LIRNE.NET course on “Telecom Reform: Strategies to achieve connectivity and convergence,” was held February 25th - March 3rd, 2007 at the Changi Village Hotel, Singapore. It was attended by 33 persons from 13 countries, ranging from Mongolia to Congo and South Africa to Bhutan.
Among the participants were 13 persons from regulatory agencies, including three members of regulatory collegiums. Eleven persons from the management of telecom operators, and nine from research organizations, universities and civil society made up the balance. Twenty were men; and 13 women.
The course had two components: a conventional lecture and assignment based module of five…
Dialog Telekom took a courageous step in 2002, deciding within weeks of the Cease Fire Agreement being signed that it would supply telecom services to the people of the North and East who had been excluded from the country’s telecom revolution for so long, because of the conflict and the military’s prohibition of service in conflict areas. The services thus provided were, without question, the most important dividend that the people of Jaffna saw from the path of peace, followed by the mobility allowed by the opening and restoring of the A9 highway.
Now, Dialog and the people of the North are paying the price of the path of war. For two months, the mobile networks have been shut down in the North, with service being…
The above column presents evidence to the effect that:
“Given enough time and competition, reformed infrastructure does reduce disparities among regions.
The reforms that started to have effect in the mid 1990s, with the licensing of the fourth mobile operator and the two fixed entrants in 1995-96, the partial privatization and managerial reform of Sri Lanka Telecom in 1997, and improvements in regulation starting from 1998, did result in allowing the rural people of this country greater access to telecom services.
Of course, it must be noted that the dazzling growth in the Northern Province (Jaffna and Vavuniya districts) was only made possible by the cease fire agreement of 2002, the lifting of the nonsensical ban on mobile telephony in conflict areas, and the…
Nuwan Waidyanatha - Project Manager, Last Mile Hazard Warning System
The socioeconomic belief is that a CAP message relay is one way of effectively managing disasters, and that is what is envisioned in the Last-Mile Hazard Warning System (LM-HWS) Pilot Project. I will be talking about the current Workpackage of the LM-HWS project, which is developing the Hazard Information Hub (HIH). The general objective of the LM-HWS project is to evaluate the suitability of a selected set of ICT that can communicate CAP messages and alert the village first-responders. The Sarvodaya HIH was specifically built with the intension of providing structured risk information such as CAP messages to the local communities.
Extended Family
05 June 2006 14:23:29
Sri Lanka opens the door for fifth mobile phone operator
June 5, 2006 (LBO) – Sri Lanka plans to expand its mobile phone market to five players, in a bid to bring down costs of telephony, the telecom regulator said Monday.
Sri Lanka’s mobile market had grown 53.5 percent to 3.34 million customers as at end 2005, according to TRC figures.
The island’s cellular penetration is expected to increase to 20.0 percent in 2006, from 17.3 percent last year, according to industry analysts.
“Mobile phones are one of the fastest growing segments in the economy now, and it is showing potential to grow further,” notes Ratwatte.
Dialog Telekom, currently dominates the market with over 2-million subscribers.
…
In May 2006 Airtel launched a Tamil SMS solution developed by MicroImage, a Sri Lankan software firm, in the State of Tamilnadu.
Tamil and Sinhala SMS are offered in Sri Lanka by Dialog Telekom and Celltel Lanka.
The service is based on a key-entry system enabling a customer to type the SMS as fast as in English and “a one touch function guiding them using the key pad to type Tamil letters”, according to Airtel. “The subscriber needs to download the application free of charge from ‘Airtel Live’ on to their handsets. Those receiving the Tamil SMS also need to download the application in order to read it in Tamil. In the event of the recipient not downloading it, the message is automatically transliterated and the Tamil…
CDMA is a big story in Sri Lanka these days. As a result of the frequency refarming process that was started in 2003 with the issuance of 1800 GSM frequencies to Dialog Telekom and Mobitel through an auction, 800 CDMA frequencies were released earlier this year by the Telecom Regulatory Commission. The article by Amal Jayasinghe in lbo.lk provides more detail on how the rollout is proceeding. Shortly after the article was published, Suntel began to offer LKR 1500 discounts, which may be the start of the price reductions I refer to in the Jayasinghe piece.
Suntel has also announced that it will offer pre-paid fixed service for the first time in Sri Lanka. These developments have many interesting connections with LIRNEasia projects, including the focus on…
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