LIRNEasia » Egypt

FCC seeks to define when mobile networks can be turned off

Rohan Samarajiva — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 11:26:11 +0000

Assailing the shutting off of mobile networks in Egypt and Libya and then allowing the same to be done by the Bay Area Rapid Transit Authority was hypocritical. But American hypocrisy has limits. They have launched a public-comment process to define the terms. When will we see such actions in the developing world?

The Federal Communications Commission is reviewing whether or when the police and other government officials can intentionally interrupt cellphone and Internet service to protect public safety.

Late Thursday, the commission requested public comment on the issue, which came to widespread attention last August, when Bay Area Rapid Transit in San Francisco shut off cellphone service for three hours in some stations to hinder planned protests there.

The transit system interrupted service without notice to the F.C.C. or the California Public Utilities Commission. The interruption was in anticipation of protests in BART stations in response to the fatal shooting of a man in July by a BART police officer.

Julius Genachowski, the F.C.C. chairman, said in a statement that such a shutdown “raises serious legal and policy issues, and must meet a very high bar.”

Report.

Google to foster innovation in Egypt

Rohan Samarajiva — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 11:51:28 +0000

Perhaps the program should have been named for Wael Ghonim.

A bus branded with the Google logo will be traveling across 10 governorates in Egypt starting this week, including stops at universities in Cairo and Alexandria, scouting for the next generation of technology entrepreneurs with homegrown ideas on the scale of Facebook or LinkedIn.

“We will put someone’s dream through a seven-month crash course that will help turn it into a commercially viable business,” said Wael Fakharany, Google’s manager in Egypt. “We have been working on this concept for nine months. We had signed a contract with the Egyptian government in 2009 to invest in the country’s Internet ecosystem and this is part of that commitment.”

Full story.

The al-Assad variation

Rohan Samarajiva — Mon, 23 May 2011 12:37:55 +0000

The al-Assad government in Syria appears to be responding to the use of ICTs by citizens unhappy with the political status quo more intelligently than its fallen counterpart in Egypt.

The Syrian government is cracking down on protesters’ use of social media and the Internet to promote their rebellion just three months after allowing citizens to have open access to Facebook and YouTube, according to Syrian activists and digital privacy experts.

Security officials are moving on multiple fronts — demanding dissidents turn over their Facebook passwords and switching off the 3G mobile network at times, sharply limiting the ability of dissidents to upload videos of protests to YouTube, according to several activists in Syria. And supporters of President Bashar al-Assad, calling themselves the Syrian Electronic Army, are using the same tools to try to discredit dissidents.

In contrast to the Mubarak government in Egypt, which tried to quash dissent by shutting down the country’s entire Internet, the Syrian government is taking a more strategic approach, turning off electricity and telephone service in neighborhoods with the most unrest, activists say.

Full story.

Gyanendra’s Law affirmed

Rohan Samarajiva — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 17:34:56 +0000

Gyanendra’s Law states that a government that shuts down its entire national telecom network does not survive. The resignation of Hosni Mubarak affirms the law.

Named for the last King of Nepal. Could have been called Jaruselzki’s Law, but Nepal could do with some visibility one thinks. And it is a toss-up which tyrant’s name is harder to pronounce.

The act of pulling the kill switch could be named in dishonor of Mubarak, as in doing a Mubarak; a partial Mubarak; a short Mubarak and so on.

What is the level of competition that makes a kill switch tough to throw?

Rohan Samarajiva — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 14:02:54 +0000

How many Internet providers does your country have? If five your government can do a Mubarak. However many you have, if they all go through one or two choke points as in Bangladesh, easy.

The big lesson of Egypt may be less the danger of overmighty government than what it shows about how national authorities can (and can’t) close down the internet. The authorities there simply told internet service providers (ISPs) to switch off their computers. The bulk of Egyptian internet surfers use only five providers. In less competitive markets, even fewer need be nobbled. In America, by contrast, the top five ISPs account for only half the market and the top ten for 70%. An American internet shutdown would require the co-operation or coercion of many hundreds of companies and individuals.

This and other ruminations on the Egyptian kill switch from the Economist.

Role of ICTs in revolution

Rohan Samarajiva — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 06:30:21 +0000

Telephone networks were shut down when Lech Walesa was leading the workers of Gdansk against the Polish government in the early 1980s. King Gyanendra shut down the mobile networks of Nepal a few years back. It is not the first time that telecom networks have been shut down by governments with their backs to the wall.

Reflections on the Egyptian shut down should be read in this historical context. The key difference is that Egypt was perhaps at a qualitatively higher level of ICT use when they hit the kill switch. It is also worth considering what happened to General Jaruzelski and King Gyanendra.

During initial wave of Tunisian protests, expressions of solidarity were made via social networking sites such as Facebook, but it was in the organisation of the first Egyptian protests that the powerful role that social media would play in these events truly became apparent.
The protests themselves are believed to have been instigated by a Youtube video calling for action; this spread via social media and resulted in a spate of protests being organised nationwide, largely via Facebook and other social networking sites, with Twitter proving particularly popular for posting up-to-the-minute information as the protests progressed.
Coordinated protests began on January 25th, with thousands gathering in cities across Egypt, including Cairo, Alexandria, Suez and Ismaïlia. Three days later, ahead of large-scale planned protests, the government took action apparently aimed at preventing long-distance communication: internet services were shut down, and mobile operators were obliged to suspend services following a government order.
Although Saturday 29th January marked the day on which 80% of Egypt’s Internet access went dark, this was not the first move made by the government against telecommunications services. Shortly after the insurgency began, Mubarak had ordered that access to various social networking sites be suspended, directly acknowledging the role that such sites had played in the organisation of protests.
The government’s attempt to block access to telecommunications speaks volumes about how these services have become a part of everyday existence over recent years. After Egyptian state television and newspapers notoriously attempted to play down the initial wave of protests, any pretence of impartiality was shattered, dealing a blow to the credibility of state media and underlining the role of telecommunications in providing reliable information.
More than this though, the reaction indicated that Mubarak’s government was attempting to prevent the spread of information about the protests in a desperate bid to limit their impact – essentially a tacit acknowledgement of how powerful social media have become in their ability to connect and unify people.
Speaking about the situation in Egypt, Microsoft’s Bill Gates said: “Whenever you do something extraordinary like [shutting down the internet] you’re sort of showing people you’re afraid of the truth getting out, so it’s a very difficult tactic.”

Kill switch workaround

Rohan Samarajiva — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 14:40:16 +0000

Looks like it’s not enough to shut down the Internet. You got to shut down all the mobile networks too.

Unedited, raw, anonymous and emotional, Egyptian voices are trickling out through a new service that evades attempts by the authorities to suppress them by cutting Internet services.

There is still some cellphone service, so a new social-media link that marries Google, Twitter and SayNow, a voice-based social media platform, gives Egyptians three phone numbers to call and leave a message, which is then posted on the Internet as a recorded Twitter message. The messages are at twitter.com/speak2tweet and can also be heard by telephone.

Full story.

Kill switch in Egypt

Rohan Samarajiva — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 07:39:21 +0000

I never expected an economy as advanced as that of Egypt to shut down the Internet. But it did. Not completely, as shown by the Figure in the Wired article that I have taken the excerpt below from.

Egypt’s largest ISPs shut off their networks Thursday, making it impossible for traffic to get to websites hosted in Egypt or for Egyptians to use e-mail, Twitter or Facebook. The regime of President Hosni Mubarak also ordered the shut down of mobile phone networks, including one run by the U.K.-based Vodafone, all in an attempt to undermine the growing protests over Mubarak’s autocratic rule of the country.

While the world has seen net filtering and disruption in places like Burma and Iran following social and political unrests, Egypt’s decision to shutter it is different, according to Craig Labovitz, the chief scientist at Arbor Networks, a computer security firm that has nearly unequaled real data on international internet traffic.

“What’s different with Egypt is the scale,” Labovitz told Wired.com. “By that I mean that Egypt has fairly significant internet infrastructure with a diversity of paths — satellite, microwave and fiber links — a number of large providers and hundreds of smaller providers. It is one of the more significant internet infrastructures in the Middle East and certainly within Africa. Egypt has a very well-developed economy with a significant reliance on the internet, this is very different from Burma.”

So how did Egypt shut down the net? Did someone in the government hit a giant stop button?

How is it done? What are the ramifications? These are the questions we will be pondering, in addition to the fate for Mobarak.

The liberating potential of social media

Rohan Samarajiva — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 07:39:09 +0000

In light of what’s going on in North Africa and Western Asia, the liberating potential of social media is very much on the agenda these days.

Here is Clayton Shirky on the subject in a debate in Foreign Affairs:

It would be impossible to tell the story of Philippine President Joseph Estrada’s 2000 downfall without talking about how texting allowed Filipinos to coordinate at a speed and on a scale not available with other media. Similarly, the supporters of Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero used text messaging to coordinate the 2004 ouster of the People’s Party in four days; anticommunist Moldovans used social media in 2009 to turn out 20,000 protesters in just 36 hours; the South Koreans who rallied against beef imports in 2008 took their grievances directly to the public, sharing text, photos, and video online, without needing permission from the state or help from professional media. Chinese anticorruption protesters use the instant-messaging service QQ the same way today. All these actions relied on the power of social media to synchronize the behavior of groups quickly, cheaply, and publicly, in ways that were unavailable as recently as a decade ago.

Here’s indi.ca in Sri Lanka’s Sunday Leader:

Another characteristic of modern revolutions is that they are efficiently coordinated via social networks like Twitter and Facebook and cellular technology like SMS. While aging dictators have been adept at censoring mainstream media and obstructing public assembly, they have been slow to crack down on social media. By the time they do, like Egypt shutting off the Internet, it is often too late. Social networks by themselves cannot ignite revolutions, but they do seem able to catalyze the street protests that ultimately do.

We have been thinking/talking about the larger problem of ICTs and their relation to liberation/coercion for some time including issues in Kashmir, Iran, Jaffna, and Myanmar.

Rohan Samarajiva speaks at OECD/infoDev workshop at the Internet Governance Forum

Chanuka Wattegama — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 10:30:59 +0000

“When a business model, rather than direct government action, is delivering the goods the most appropriate government action is that which supports the business model. Policy and regulatory actions must be derived more from analysis of the requirements of the business model and less from public administration theory.”

How it applies to Internet and broadband is what Rohan Samarajiva, Chair and CEO, LIRNEasia explained in his keynote speech at the workshop ‘Expanding access to the Internet and broadband for development’ on November 16, 2009, at the Internet Governance forum 2009. His presentation entitled, ‘How the developing world may participate in the global Internet Economy: Innovation driven by competition’, can be downloaded here.

The session was chaired by Dimitri Ypsilanti, Head of Information, Communication and Consumer Policy Division, OECD. The discussants were Tim Kelly, Lead ICT Policy Specialist, infoDev – World Bank, Olfat A. Monsef, Vice President of National Telecommunication Regulator, Telecom Services, Egypt, Anriette Esterhuysen, Executive Director, Association for Progressive Communications (APC) and Virat Bhatia, President – External Affairs, AT&T, South Asia will be the discussants.

The workshop is jointly organized by OECD and infoDev.

LIRNEasia at 7th ITU WTI event, Cairo, 3 – 5 March 2009

Nirmali Sivapragasam — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 03:27:11 +0000

Helani Galpaya, COO and Indicators Specialist at LIRNEasia has been invited to make a presentation at the 7th World Telecommunication/ICT Indicators (WTI) Meeting in Cairo, Egypt from 3 – 5 March, 2009. She will be speaking on demand-side data collection work LIRNEasia does, along with some of the supply-side benchmarking and NSO/NRA capacity-building work.

An online version of the agenda can be viewed here.

The presentation can be viewed here.

Orascom wins a 3G license in North Korea

Abu Saeed Khan — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 11:28:14 +0000

In what can only be described as a surprise announcement, Egypt’s Orascom Telecom Holding (OTH) says that it has been granted a 3G phone license in North Korea.

Orascom says that it intends to invest up to US$400 million in network infrastructure and license fee over the first three years. OTH intends to cover Pyongyang and most of the major cities during the first 12 months of operations. Read more.

Iraq sells 3 mobile licenses for $3.75 billion

Abu Saeed Khan — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 12:42:21 +0000

Iraq has sold three mobile phone licences for $3.75 billion to Kuwait’s Mobile Telecommunications Co (MTC), AsiaCell and Iraq’s Korek Telecom. The three firms, which already run networks in the war-torn country, made the highest bids in an auction in the Jordanian capital that began on Thursday.

TurkCell and Egypt’s Orascom had also bid for licences but dropped out of the race for one of the few sectors to thrive amid Iraq’s instability and crumbling infrastructure. The fixed-line network was hit by sanctions after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and by bombing during the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Less than 4 percent of Iraqis have landlines.
Read more.

Bangladesh the ‘Golden Boy’ of South Asia: Global UNDP Report

Abu Saeed Khan — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 13:31:59 +0000

Dhaka, Nov 9 (www.bdnews24.com) – The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Report for 2006, launched globally Thursday, revealed that Bangladesh had shown impressive gains in water and sanitation sector although Asia’s emerging giants were lagging.

“Income matters, but public policy shapes the conversion of income into human development,” said the report, entitled “Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty and the Global Water Crisis.”

“India may outperform Bangladesh as a high growth globalisation success story, but the tables are turned when the benchmark for success shifts to sanitation: despite an average income some 60% higher, India has a lower rate of sanitation coverage. Similar gaps between wealth and coverage are observed for water,” the report revealed.

Since 1975, Bangladesh has steadily improved life expectancy, education, and the standard of living. The nation moved into the medium developed countries’ category in the Human Development Index from 2003, which ranks 177 countries according to achievements.

In 2006, Bangladesh again ranked among the world’s medium developed countries at 137, which is two steps up than last year’s. Ten years ago, Bangladesh was at the lowest level in the world so far as access to proper sanitation in its rural areas was concerned.

Despite being one of the world’s poorest countries, it is now close to achieving nationwide sanitation coverage by 2010, thanks to a ‘total sanitation campaign’ promoted by NGOs and local authorities.

According to the report, poor farmers face a potentially catastrophic water crisis from the combination of climate change and competition for scarce water resources. Intense competition for water is now one of the gravest threats to sustained human development.

Rising industrial demand, urbanisation, population growth and pollution were placing unprecedented stress on water systems —and on agriculture. There is a substantial group of countries that stand to be affected by climate change.

Bangladesh, Egypt, Nigeria and Thailand have large populations living in delta areas threatened by saline intrusion. The low-lying regions of Bangladesh support more than 110 million people in one of the most densely populated regions of the world, and more than half of Bangladesh lies at less than 5 metres above sea level.

The World Bank has estimated that by the end of the 21st century sea levels for the country could rise by as much as 1.8 metres, predicting worst scenarios with land losses of 16%.

The probable affected area supports 13% of the population and produces 12% of GDP.

Challenging predictions that increasing competition for water will inevitably provoke armed conflicts, the HDR said that cross-border cooperation over water resources had already been far more pervasive and successful than been commonly presumed, offering many models for the resolution of future international water disputes.

In the past 50 years, there have been 37 cases of reported violence between states over water; all but seven incidences took place in the Middle East.

Yet over the same period, more than 200 treaties on water were negotiated between countries, said the Report.

For countries like Bangladesh, which depends on India for 91 percent of its water to irrigate crops and replenish aquifers, the report said that the case was clear for cross-border cooperation on water.

The report recommended that everyone should have at least 20 litres of clean water per day and the poor should get it for free.

“Governments should aim to spend a minimum of one percent GDP on water and sanitation, and enhance equity,” it recommended.

It also called for an extra US$3.4 billion to $4 billion annually as the development assistance has fallen in real terms over the past decade. To bring the MDG on water and sanitation into reach, aid flows will have to double, said the report.

The 2006 HDR estimates the total additional cost of achieving the MDG on access to water and sanitation—to be sourced domestically and internationally—at about $10 billion a year.

“The $10 billion price tag for the MDG seems a large sum —but it has to be put in context. It represents less than five days’ worth of global military spending and less than half what rich countries spend each year on mineral water,” said the Report.

The report was launched from Cape Town of South Africa Thursday at 7 pm (BST). Kevin Watkins is the Lead Author of the 2006 report, which includes special contributions from U.K. Chancellor Gordon Brown, Nigeria’s Finance Minister Ngozi Ok onjo-Iweala, President Lula of Brazil, former US President Carter, and UN Secretary -General Kofi Annan.

The bounty of sensible regulation in Africa and Middle East

Abu Saeed Khan — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 08:56:16 +0000

Arab Mobile Phone Subscriptions Jump 70% in 2005
Source: www.cellular-news.com/story/18589.php
The number of mobile phone subscriptions in the Arab world has grown by a whopping 70 percent in 2005, underlining a strong consumer demand coupled by increased liberalization and competition in Arab telecom markets, according to a recently published Madar Research study. The study also reveals that Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates have achieved mobile phone penetration levels among their population that are comparable with those prevalent in Europe and Pacific Rim countries.
Mobile subscription in the Arab world – total of 18 countries covered by Madar Research excluding Somalia, Mauritania, Djibouti and Comoros – grew from 51.19 million by end 2004 to 87.06 million by end 2005, exceeding all expectation and forecasts.
This resulted in an average pan-Arab penetration rate equivalent to 28 subscriptions per 100 of population, ranging in individual countries from a low of just over five percent penetration to a high that exceeds 100 percent.
“Thanks to a telecom liberalization drive which gained momentum in many Arab countries over the past couple of years and the resulting competitive environment and dropping prices, mobile telephony has become accessible to a wider base of Arab consumers,” said Abdul Kader Kamli, president and research director of the Dubai Media City-based Madar Research. “Due to falling fees and rates – not to mention the mobility advantage – mobile phones have interestingly become a more viable alternative in many Arab countries where fixed telephone service is either unreliable or unable to meet demand. In such countries the subscription ratio of mobile lines to fixed lines can now reach a high of 10 to one as is the case in Morocco, which is by far higher than the ratio in the industrialized world,” Kamli added.
Madar Research expects mobile growth to sustain strong levels, especially in countries where penetration rates are still low.
Classification of Arab countries by regions shows that the highest growth rate in mobile subscription was recorded in the least information and communication technology-savvy countries of Yemen and Sudan, while the lowest growth was seen in the more mature markets of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region. The GCC witnessed growth of around 38 percent, while North Africa (excluding Egypt) made almost 86 percent, followed by nearly 83 percent in the Levant, which groups Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine and Egypt. In terms of penetration rates the GCC leads by far the Arab world, followed by North Africa and the Levant, respectively.
Among other findings of the study are Libya’s remarkable three-digit growth in mobile subscription – the highest in the Arab world in 2005, Jordan’s rise to become the most competitive mobile telecom market among the countries covered by the study, and Bahrain’s ascendance to the list of world’s top countries in mobile penetration.