European lawmakers on Thursday approved a plan to extend and lower the Continent’s limits on mobile phone roaming charges paid by consumers for another five years, and added the first controls on mobile Internet use.

In addition to the caps, the legislation adopted by the European Parliament will allow E.U. residents to buy roaming services from a carrier besides their regular operator beginning in 2014, an attempt to create competition in the market that will lower prices and supplant the need for price controls.

Report.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has opened channels with its counterparts in other countries, including the UK, to address the issue of high tariffs for international roaming services. TRAI has suggested that regulators should ask local operators in their countries to enable bilateral roaming agreements aimed at bringing down the tariffs.

At present, international roaming services come at a premium even though the cost of offering this has come down drastically due to better routing technology. For example, an Indian consumer travelling in Europe has to pay over Rs 200 a minute for both incoming and outgoing calls. Similarly, foreign travellers coming into India have to pay a hefty amount for making and receiving calls. According to TRAI officials, it has been suggested that regulators should find a way to get operators in their respective country to offer cheaper roaming tariffs. TRAI is internally preparing a paper on this issue.

Well worth watching because national regulation is not working too well. Perhaps true independence will come only when it is supra-national.

On May 25, Berec won the right to review decisions like these to verify their conformity with E.U. telecommunications law. The commission’s powers have also been enhanced: It and Berec can now ask to scrutinize local decisions more closely by ordering a “second-phase” review, a process designed to goad national regulators into adhering to E.U. rules or facing a commission veto. Before May 25, the commission could only comment on, but not veto, wayward national regulations.

Officially it is the commission, not Berec, that would wield the veto. But Berec could play a significant enforcer’s role if it shared the commission’s concerns about compliance.

The fact that Berec exists at all is a victory of sorts. Initially, the commission sought to obtain an undisputed veto over national regulators. But individual countries like Britain, wary of losing control to Brussels, objected. The resulting compromise created an advisory panel whose members must obtain a high degree of unanimity before they can sanction or criticize each other or make other significant decisions.

Full report.

“We have to avoid regulation which might deter investment and an efficient use of the available resources,” Ms. Kroes said during a meeting on net neutrality held by the commission and the European Parliament.

The desire for operators to control traffic on their networks or to pass on the costs to the biggest users — or to the traffic generators themselves — has grown as the popularity of video and file-sharing has exploded.

As neither we nor most of our readers do not have access to the thread it was posted, we like to continue the discussion here.

__________________________________________________________________

Hi people,

I come from one of the ten largest economies in the world, with nearly 200 million people, 8.5 million km2, and 5.564 municipalities, where 94% of the people do *not* have access to any form of broadband – the “B” in the famous BRIC acronym.

I am just coming out of the IGF workshop “Expanding broadband access for a global Internet economy: development dimensions”. I left the workshop a bit shocked with the concepts expressed, not by the AT&T representative (who not surprisingly said AT&T subdsidiaries countries other than the USA should be considered local companies because they employ local people), who as usual is just doing his job in defending the so-called “market”, but by other speeches which seemed to completely ignore that, in most of our contries, there is a de facto monopoly or cartel situation regarding the telco infrastructure, and that public policy ought to centrally take this into account if the aim is to universalize broadband access with quality to all families.

One of the speakers (from LIRNEasia) said that “lower prices require lower costs” and therefore one should just “phase out universal access levies and rationalize taxes”. I retorted that pricing per Mb/s of ADSL broadband in São Paulo might be 65 times higher than the same price charged by the same company in London — and therefore no amount of levies or taxes would justify such scandalous pricing difference, not to speak of the much lower QoS.

I suggested that, instead of eliminating the universal service funds (whose levies are a very small portion of price composition of broadband), we should insist on reforming policy regarding the use of these funds. The reply I heard was that it makes no sense to keep funds that are not used or are squandered (!!). Impact of the fund’s levy in Brazil is just 1% of the price of the fixed line telephone connection — its impact in the price of broadband (a separate bill even if the service is not unbundled) is zero.

There was also a recommendation that we should be “gentle on QoS” to facilitate things regarding universalization of access — fascinating. Again, examples abound in which telcos guarantee only 10% of the nominal contracted rate, and in practice this might be even less. Should we just agree with absurds like this in the name of “it is better to have something than nothing”???

And then there is the crucial question of unbundling, central to the policy debate in the developed countries as it directly impacts universalization through an effective reduction of prices for the final user. It is a major challenge for broadband public policy in developing countries, where regulators are usually in the hands of the telco cartels. The word was not mentioned (not a single time) by anyone in the panel, as if irrelevant to the development dimensions of broadband.

The speaker also mentioned that the “need” to reduce costs for the big telcos would require reduction of international bandwidth costs. One of the two big carriers in Brazil, a Brazilian conglomerate, owns redundant fiber running from Brazil to Miami in rings passing through countries in the Caribbean and Central America. They own their own international link, in summary. So do the other carrier in the de facto duopoly — a major operator from Europe. This does not make any difference in pricing for the final user, although it does contribute to their profits in Brazil being far higher than in Europe for example.

Finally, the fascination with mobile. Of course the AT&T speaker started his talk by waving a fancy iPhone to the audience — mostly natural for a commercial wireless giant. But the infoDev representative and others mentioned mobile as a “solution” for the poor, and not even bothered to separate the discussion in the two main topics here: first, the mobile phone as a connectivity device to enable the user to fully use the Internet through a friendly human-machine interface, be it a common PC or special equipment for people with disabilities; second, the phone itself as *the* alternative to the full user experience that a PC or similar might provide. It seems the agency bureaucrats are satisfied with having two castes of users: a small minority of the ones who can fully use the Internet as it evolves requiring more and more multimedia capabilities on both sides (server and client), and the ones relegated to a small device on which it is barely possible to type small messages.

In the first regional LA&C preparatory meeting for the IGF, in 2008, a representative of a major telco said we should not worry about bringing the next billion to the Internet — they have cell phones, so they are connected already, problem solved. I wonder if this executive would take the place of a carpenter looking for a job, who has to compose and send by email his CV together with images of letters of recommendation to his would-be employer, and had nothing but a cell phone (smart or not) to do it. Not to speak of comparing the executive’s thin-fingered hands of a pianist with the big callous hands of the carpenter.

fraternal regards

–c.a.

The conference, “The Civil Protection Forum – Towards a more resilient society” aims to explore the concept of resilience. Climate change is likely to increase the frequency and impact of disasters, and Europe has to be prepared for this challenge. The Forum will start a debate on a comprehensive European disaster management strategy to enhance resilience. The organizers plan to bring together around 500 delegates, speakers and exhibitors from politics, academia, the civil protection services and international organisations.

Chanuka Wattegama, Senior Research Manager, LIRNEasia will be one of the speakers in the six practice-oriented seminars will look more closely at how European civil protection works in the field – how does it integrate with other international actors, three major phases of an emergency (prevention, preparedness, and response) and the roles of different stakeholders (institutions, civil protection professionals and civil society).

The agenda can be downloaded here.

Anybody could have guessed this. It is unimaginable that entire world will go through a recession simultaneously. Not everyone can be losers for too long. There should be winners somewhere. For example, what would the US firms that find their human resources costs, logically do? They outsource to Bangalore. So the BPO industry in India grows. Peter’s loss becomes Patel’s gain.

The Economist today presented the evidence.

MOODY’S Economy.com has mapped the geographic spread of the worst global downturn since the Depression. All of North America is in recession now. In Europe only Norway, Slovenia and Slovakia have avoided a similar fate, although Moody’s reckons these countries are on the brink of a downturn. Emerging Asia looks cheerier, although the small export-led economies of Singapore and Hong Kong are shrinking, as are Malaysia and Thailand. Even the BRICs are looking a bit diminished, with downturns in both Brazil and Russia. At least India and China are growing (the latter at a pace that is causing worries about overheating). Data for Africa are spotty but the continent’s biggest economy, South Africa, is in recession. The IMF expects global GDP to shrink by 1.4% this year, with rich countries’ economies contracting by around 3.8%.

Customers’ appetite for mobile data shows no sign of abating, if you look at figures supplied by network operator Orange.

It now has 3.8 million users on 3G phones or with 3G dongles that plug into your computer and give you broadband access over the cellular data networks.

According to Orange, 12,877 gigabytes of data travel over its network to 3G phones and dongles each day. That sounds a lot – but it’s actually only about 3.3 megabyes per user.

It’s why Paul Jevons, director of products, portals and services, told me: “The 3G dongle market is in the early stages of development; it only kicked off last year.”

In the three months through March, the company said its profit declined to 122 million euros ($162.3 million) from 1.2 billion euros a year earlier. Sales fell 27 percent, to 9.3 billion euros from 12.7 billion euros.

The number of cellphones sold fell 45 percent in Latin America, 31 percent in North America and 27 percent in Africa and the Middle East. Elsewhere, the pace of decline was more moderate — 13 percent in Europe, 15 percent in China and 17.3 percent in the rest of Asia.

Nokia reiterated its expectation that industry sales would decline 10 percent this year from 2008.

Full story here.

Without direct government action, other than enabling policies such as the abolition of international gateway monopolies, and the kind of fuss that has accompanied the regulation of roaming charges within Europe, roaming has been abolished in East Africa.

Why not in South Asia?

Why can this not be done in South Asia? Telenor has a presence in three of the major markets in the SAARC region: dominant in Bangladesh; significant in Pakistan and getting established in India. Airtel is in India and Sri Lanka. What if they simply allow their customers to roam at normal rates within their networks?

Then we might see Mobitel in Sri Lanka take the lead in establishing a consortium with BSNL in India and Dhiraagu in the Maldives to offer a similar facility to its roaming customers. The consortia would grow, and roaming rates would come down from their present rapacious highs. Unless the competitive response kicks in early, the first mover may even gain some new business.

Whatever happens, the end objective of regional integration will be served. And at the next SAARC Summit, the leaders of the region’s governments can take credit for having implemented at least one of the items of the Colombo Declaration.

Full article in LBO.s

For the Sevilla meeting, in addition to CPRsouth (represented by Rohan Samarajiva), ACORN-Redecom (represented by Raul Katz) and the inchoate CPR africa (represented by Alison Gillwald) were invited separately, signifying rapid growth in the South in the past few months. Of course, both Alison and a representative of DIRSI, which is a key constituent of ACORN-Redecom, were present in Beijing as well.

Each of the representatives shared their views on how they set about their missions. More important than the formal discussion were the preceding substantive presentations made by those from outside Europe, which highlighted the value of cross-fertilization of ideas. Each agreed that it would be a good idea to keep the cross-fertilization going and committed to come up with workable plans on how to operationalize it.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said China’s biggest mobile operator, China Mobile, was awarded a license for TD-SCDMA, the domestically-developed 3G standard.

The other two main carriers, China Telecom and China Unicom, received licenses for the US-developed CDMA2000 and Europe’s WCDMA, respectively.

The 3G high-speed networks can handle faster data downloads, allowing handset users to make video calls and watch TV programs.

Read the full story in China Daily here.

In an interview with BizIT, Jaikishan Rajaraman, GSMA director of product and service development, said the number of users in Asia subscribing to HSPA will swell from 26.5 million to 53.5 million over the next 12 months. Fuelling this trend are soaring demand from both businesses and consumers, coupled with falling prices of mobile broadband services, he said. This trend is expected to be mirrored in other parts of the world, including Europe and the US.

In August, GSMA – a global trade organisation comprising more than 750 mobile phone operators around the world – reported that the number of HSPA subscribers worldwide had exceeded 50 million, from 11 million a year ago. There are 197 HSPA commercial deployments in 92 countries, with Asia currently accounting for 46 per cent of the global HSPA subscriber base, according to GSMA.

‘Mobile broadband has truly made socio-economic impact, especially in emerging markets like Indonesia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka as well as developed markets like Australia, Japan and South Korea,’ said Mr Rajaraman.

Read the full story in Asiaone Business here.

Net neutrality has become a big issue in the US as internet congestion has increased. In Europe, regulators and industry players have claimed that the situation is different because users have more choice of network providers, and the debate has been more muted.

However, there have been growing concern among big telecoms companies that changes introduced in the European Parliament into the so-called telecoms package – the sweeping legislation which is designed to overhaul European Union telecoms laws – could open doors to net neutrality regulation in the future.

Read the full story in ‘Financial Times’ here.

Asia’s emerging markets, comprising eight nations, are expected to see mobile subscriber net gains of 573 million by end-2012, breaching the one billion mark to close the year at an estimated 1.06 billion subscribers, a report from research firm Frost & Sullivan said.

In 2007, these emerging markets were home to some 487 million mobile users, accounting for 37.1% of Asia-Pacific’s total mobile subscriber base, the report said.

The report also said the mobile services sector in eight emerging Asia-Pac countries (excluding China) earned revenues of $33.27 billion in 2007. This is predicted to reach $61.35 billion by end-2013, at a CAGR of 10.7% (2007-2013).

Countries included in this study are Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Laos, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Vietnam; all with mobile penetration rates of under 50%.

According to Frost & Sullivan industry analyst Jeff Teh, over half of the world’s mobile networks are believed to exist in emerging markets.

“Most mature markets in Europe, the Americas and even Asia are fast reaching saturation, adding fewer connections and offering fewer growth opportunities. As mobile operators in Asia scramble to add another staggering one billion subscribers onto their networks, Asia’s emerging nations offer the most palpable growth prospects, particularly in the rural sectors,” Teh said.

He adds that such opportunities are however not without a gamble “the inherent characteristics across these emerging markets are that they are generally lower-income hence low ARPU segments, with blended ARPU as low as $3.90 per month in some countries, and subscribers are largely inclined towards prepaid services.