“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 stealing about 1,000 Verizon phone customers a day, and their discounted services are making it hard for Verizon to win them back — another reason to get the fiber network up quickly.”

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“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?

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 map of BP’s coverage overlaid on top of the railway line map over time would give a good indication of the access to the fiber network has helped expand coverage.

Trigger factors
Success was determined by the fact that GP access to infrastructure but also by the fact that they were able to piggy back on GB. That window of opportunity was only available to GT at that time.
RS: Why didn’t Suntel utilize a similar model and not establish similar relationships with communications shops?
Mahinda: Its hard to recover payments from communication bureaus. Individual customers are better at repayment.
DG: are there other ways to identify credit worthy individuals without using the microfinance system as has been used in Bangladesh? For example, Suntel can work with a banks that has a network of branches in the rural areas to identify customers  who have repayed their loans.
MKJ: Social capital i.e. shared values is what sustains such a business model like Grameen. The question is if we strip microfinance would this be viable.
RS: With regards to Suntel what are the bad-debt customers like:
Mahinda: While ’s bad-debt rate is high when compared to developed countries. Even with developing countries are bad debt rate is high since we don’t utilize too many coercive measures to force customers to pay. As for the classes of bad-debt users: generally Consumer default rate is high. However in terms of numbers, business are the highest bad-debt user class followed by communication bureaus.
RS: GP pushes down the credit-worthiness problem to Grameen Bank. Similarly Suntel has pushed it to Ceylinco. Hence for success, credit-worthiness needs to be dealt with by somebody.
DS: Why don’t companies in build links with Banks suggest that linkages be built up in with Banks. However as RS points out then it begs the question, how many people in actually use banks. In the case of this is figure is low.
RS: What microfinance does is to allow people without established credit-worthiness to start.
Mahinda: Tritel buys bulk from Suntel and takes the risk out for Suntel allowing Suntel to bring down bad-debt from 14% to below 5%.
Mahinda: at present levels of technological development, CDMA is cheaper than GSM,
RS: There are significant economies of scale in telecom. What was Grameen’s roll out like? When Grammen found that they couldn’t negotiate interconnection, they compensated by driving up the number of subscribers in the network. Because of fiber and brand name they were available to rollout quickly.
RS final thoughts: It might be good to have another section on credit-worthiness and then another section on rollout. Fit of structure and problem, i.e. this may be good model for countries which have similar regulatory regimes to and with similar teledensity. It seems that fiber was very important for Grameen’s rollout since it helped bring their capex down. The brand name goodwill value of Grameen is extremely valuable for everything that Grameen does in . And actually Grameen is becoming a monopoly: it is used to be the case that Grameen couldn’t get interconnection when they started, but now they are not willing to give interconnection to others.