In the 1990s, I was involved in intense debates in the US about how to incentivize telcos to bring fiber closer to the home. It’s finally happening, and guess what is driving it? Competition.
“Verizon will spend about $20 billion by the end of the decade to reach 16 million homes from Florida to California. But it is in New York City where Verizon has the most at stake, because New Yorkers are some of the nation’s biggest buyers of video, Internet and phone services. The company plans to spend about $3 billion to reach the city’s 3.1 million homes and apartments.
With such a high concentration of potential customers, competition is fierce — and Verizon has been losing ground. Time Warner Cable, Cablevision and others are…
From the Daily Mirror (Sri Lanka) of 10 March 2006:
“Minister Bogollagama also noted that the government was planning to construct a fibre optic network in Jaffna to introduce the Business Process Outsourcing industry to the area.”
Jaffna is currently connected to the rest of Sri Lanka and the world by satellite. It is intriguing to speculate how the Minister’s fiber optic network will function and who will manage it.
One assumes that for it to be of use for the BPO industry, the Minister’s fiber will have to connect to another fiber somewhere. Will this be overland, along the A9 and through LTTE controlled territory or undersea?
Points of discussion
Gender neutrality
Women have built trust via a long term relationship with GB. Hence women are chosen based on their prior relationship with GB.
MKJ: Gender patterns do emerge from the fact that GB’s best customers are women.
AZ: Groups of VPOs “monitor” each others repayments within a village since if one person doesn’t repay on time it reflects badly on the rest of the VPOs in that village
Mahinda: even in the Suntel-Ceylinco-Gramin scheme most of the credit-worthy customers are women.
On Subsidies
Since the cost structures were not available, we cannot say if the handset discounts and airtime discounts, etc. constitute subsidies
Mahinda: what does the final consumer pay?
AZ: it varies from location to location, since the VPO decides how to cost each telephone call from the user?
RS: A…
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