This is what ITU’s Telecommunication/ICT Indicators Report for the Asia-Pacific region 2008 says. It was released at ITU TELECOM ASIA 2008, Bangkok, Thailand yesterday (Sept 2, 2008).

The Report finds evidence that ICTs and broadband uptake foster growth and development, but the question remains as to the optimal speed that should be targeted in view of limited resources.

The area in which the region really stands out is the uptake of advanced Internet technologies, especially broadband Internet access. The Asia-Pacific region is the world’s largest broadband market with a 39 per cent share of the world’s total at the end of 2007. In terms of broadband access, Asia-Pacific has made remarkable progress in the past few years, with subscriber numbers growing almost five-fold in five years: from 27 million at the beginning of 2003 to 133 million at the start of 2008.

In the region’s high-income economies, ubiquitous access is progressing through a competitive race to provide ever faster fixed broadband access. Operators in Hong Kong (China) and Japan have launched one-Gigabits per second (Gbps) broadband and triple-play services aimed at the residential market, featuring applications such as Internet telephony and television. The Republic of Korea leads the world in terms of the percentage of households with fixed broadband access, and no less than five economies in the top ten are from Asia-Pacific. The Republic of Korea, Hong Kong (China), and Japan also lead the world in terms of the proportion of households with fibre optic connections, essential for supporting the next generation of ultra-high speed Internet applications.

These high-income economies are also leaders in terms of third generation (3G) mobile cellular deployment. Fixed and mobile broadband technologies complement each other and users enjoy continuous high-speed Internet access. In Singapore, a ubiquitous Internet access plan combining unlimited 8 Megabits per second (Mbps) fixed broadband, 2 Mbps mobile broadband and access at some 800 Wi-Fi hotspots is available for just USD 35 per month.

At the other extreme, in most of the region’s low and lower-middle income economies, high-speed Internet access is limited to urban areas at best, typically expensive, and often not available at all. The regional broadband divide is striking, with poor economies having a close-to-zero broadband penetration, compared to that of rich economies where one in four persons is a broadband subscriber (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Fixed broadband Internet subscribers per 100 inhabitants, 2007

The gap in available broadband speeds between rich and poor countries is as wide as broadband penetration. In Japan, the Republic of Korea and Hong Kong (China), the minimum advertised broadband speed is faster than the maximum broadband speed in Cambodia, Tonga, Laos and Bangladesh.

While in low and lower-middle income economies mobile phones have become a substitute for the shortage of fixed lines, they are not yet fulfilling the potential of broadband access. By the end of 2007, only Indonesia, the Maldives, the Philippines and Sri Lanka had commercially deployed WCDMA networks. The region’s two largest mobile markets, China and India, have yet to launch mobile broadband. By the end of 2007, there were over 120 million mobile broadband subscribers in the region (Figure 2), but almost all (97 per cent) were in high income economies.

Figure 2: Mobile cellular broadband subscribers in Asia-Pacific

While the region’s high-income economies are pushing the frontier of broadband bandwidth to a point where applications have yet to catch up, many Asia-Pacific developing economies are bandwidth starved, inhibiting the development of their information societies.

The ITU Report argues that broadband uptake enables a range of socially desirable and valuable online services in areas such as government, education and health. The use of broadband technologies can help overcome many of the basic development challenges faced by poor countries. The Report provides a number of examples where broadband connectivity has acted as a catalyst for development. These include the provision of education through distance learning in the Solomon Islands, the creation of jobs through business incubators for women in China, and the supply of communication services for disaster management in Myanmar.

Read the press release here. Full report is not yet available in the public domain.

(Please click on the images for a better view)

The $650 million project covers more than 15,000 kilometres to link South Africa to India and France through Mozambique, Madagascar, Kenya and Tanzania. It is expected to provide first broadband access to countries in East Africa, which are currently using satellite connections.  

In a similar project, NEPAD e-Africa Commission signed a deal with an American firm 5-P Holdings in November 2007 for the construction of an undersea submarine cable to link every country in Africa with the outside world.  

This is a joint project between African investors and US telecommunications development company Herakles Telecom. The cable will be ready to serve southern and eastern
Africa from 2009 onwards. Read more.

Click here to see Alcatel-Lucent’s animations of laying and repairing of submarine cable.

:: bdnews24.com ::

The Chittagong-Cox’s Bazar fibre optic transmission link with the country’s only submarine cable was back up after about 10 hours of disruptions through Monday, an official with the BTTB said.

The breakdown of the link created “congestion” in the overseas phone and disrupted internet services.

The transmission link came back up at 00:25am Tuesday after it snapped at 2:30pm Monday, according to Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Board.

In a statement, BTTB said the link snapped at Chokoria, some 120 kilometres off Chittagong towards Cox’s Bazar, the second time it has gone down with in a week.

Powered by ScribeFire.

A substantial portion of the total investment will be in fixed line Telephony and Broadband services via Dialog Broadband Networks (DBN), and Digital Television Broadcast services via Asset Media, respectively.

The investments in DBN will be directed towards the growth of CDMA-based Rural Fixed Telecommunications Infrastructure, WiMax based wireless broadband infrastructure and for the deployment of a National Fibre Optic backbone. Read more.

Such bizarre underwater international telecoms infrastructure robbery occurred on March 25 and since then Vietnam’s Internet users have been struggling with far slower speed.

The broken cable system, named TVH, was built in 1993-1995, connecting Thailand, Vietnam and Hong Kong with a capacity of 560 megabits per second.

The Vietnam Telecom International (VTI) got puzzled when the cable went down. It occurred soon after the Asia Pacific region recovered from prolonged bandwidth crisis as earthquake snapped bunch of submarine cables in the Taiwanese coast

VTI called a submarine cable fixing ship from Singapore. But its crew went bonkers after detecting 11-kilometres of the cable was missing from the floor of Ca Mau Sea. The maintenance vessel went back as it never carries that many cables in the first place.

Baffled VTI already lost four million dollars revenue and it will incur further 2.6 millions dollars to fix the underwater missing link. Vietnam’s Ministry of Defence, Ministry of Public Security, the Naval Command and military commands joined hands to catch the fishy fishermen.

Authorities have not discovered who initially cut the cable. But last Wednesday, police in the southern coastal town of Vung Tau said they captured a boat carrying 60 tons of undersea optical fibre cable, reported cellular-news.com quoting German news agency dpa.

Earlier the police also captured three boats and recovered 40 tons of similar cables. Same man, a Vung Tau resident, allegedly owns all the four boats.

But VTI’s deputy director Lan Quoc Cuong said the cable seized by police in Vung Tau does not match the cable his company owns, and they must have come from a different severed line.

He said finding the cable would have been difficult for the thieves. “The cable is located in different locations and at different depths,” he said. “Maybe, while using an anchor, they found the cable by accident and started cutting it.”

Meanwhile the Vietnamese media has made a disturbing revelation. The country’s defence ministry contracted few companies last August to salvage the decommissioned undersea copper cables. The US-backed former South Vietnamese government deployed them before the country became independent in 1975.

Reports said some of these companies apparently went for legitimate undersea treasures hunt but they may have struck the operational undersea fibre optic cables instead.

Whatever the case may be, robbing the submarine cable is getting rampant in Vietnam, said VietNamNet Bridge. So far this year, five undersea optical cable theft cases have been detected.

The latest case was on May 3 when border guards of the southern province of Kien Giang detected two fishing boats carrying 80 tonnes of cable. A boat owner said that while catching fish offshore, his boat caught the cable and they cut the cable and brought it to the mainland to sell.

Earlier on April 15, three fishing boats loaded with 80 tonnes of cable were caught in the southern province of Soc Trang. Fishermen on those boats said that they found the cable offshore and stopped catching fish to cut the cable to sell as waste.

Authorities of Kien Giang, Bac Lieu, Soc Trang provinces have seized hundreds of tonnes of telecom cable from fishing boats. Police say they have broken up five rings selling some 500 tons of illegally salvaged cable since the beginning of this year, cellular-news.com said.

President SB Yudhoyono’s government came to power on the promise of eradicating corruption and the “deal culture” that has plagued Indonesia throughout much of its existence. Initially the government promised leased-cost subsidy auction and other open transparent methods for rolling out backbone infrastructure in the country. Now a sudden announcement in the media informs us that licenses for the Palapa Ring project have been granted.

The Palapa Ring has been a “dream” project of the Indonesian government even before the financial crisis of 1997. Before the crisis it was planning on funding it with government funds. Post the financial crisis and faced with empty coffers, the Government has been pressuring telecom operators in Indonesia to use their resources to realize the Government’s dream. The enthusiasm of PT Telkom to participate in the Palapa Ring Project (in news story below) is ironic considering that it had decades to build backbone infrastructure in the country when it was the monopoly provider of domestic fixed line services and it built little. I wouldn’t be surprised if the threat of regulatory retribution hung like Damocles’s sword over Indonesian operators when they decided to participate in the Palapa Ring consortium.

Least-cost subsidy auction would have been a more transparent way of eliciting participation of Indonesian operators in the Palapa Ring Project. In those islands/regions that are commercially viable, backbones would be deployed by private  sector without any government support. In islands/regions that are sparsely populated and where landing submarine cable may not be commercially viable,least cost subsidy auction would have provided the necessary subsidy to make it worthwhile for private sector to participate in infrastructure roll-out.

Although the sum of $1.5 billion is being bandied around as the total cost of the project the consortium has yet to commit to the backbone map that DGPOSTEL and the Indonesian government has been promoting. The map as can be seen below has submarine cables landing every few kilometers as they garland the various islands. The highest cost-component of a submarine cable system are the cable landing stations.The proposed design is not cost-efficient. It would make more sense to land a submarine cable at couple of points in an island and use terrestrial fiber optic or microwave to connect the rest of the island.

Indonesian group will build US$1.5 billion Palapa network

JAKARTA, May 10 (Reuters) – Seven Indonesian companies will join forces to build a $1.5-billion 34,000 km (21,100 mile) fibre optic cable network in the country aimed at improving telecommunication infrastructure, a government official said.

Indonesia’s director general for post and telecommunication at the communication and information ministry, Basuki Yusuf Iskandar, said the group will meet next Wednesday to discuss how to implement and finance the Palapa Ring Project.

“Seven companies have obtained the licence for the Palapa Ring,” Iskandar told reporters late on Wednesday. He said PT Telekomuniasi Indonesia Tbk, PT Indosat Tbk, PT Excelcomindo Pratama Tbk, and PT Bakrie Telecom Tbk were among the seven in the consortium.

The Palapa Ring is part of the government’s effort to refurbish the country’s ailing infrastructure to spur economic growth in the world’s fourth most populous nation. Its completion will open up telecommunication access to eastern
part of Indonesia, the less developed area of the sprawling tropical nation.

Telkom’s president director, Rinaldi Firmansyah, said the company will become the majority contributor to the project and lead the group as it would use most of the telecommunication traffic through the network.

“We are still calculating the numbers, but all this time we are accounted for about 50 percent of the country’s
telecommunication traffic, so we are likely to invest about 50 percent of the project (cost),” Firmansyah told reporters.

“Financially we are ready,” he said, adding that the company’s involvement was aimed at strengthening its network in the eastern part of Indonesia.

Separately, Excelcom’s president director, Hasnul Suhaimi, said the company’s contribution to the project would be around 10 percent of the total value of the investment. He said the fibre optic network could help lower the telecommunication costs from the current system that incorporates satellites.

LANKA BUSINESS ONLINE – LBO

A new fibre optic undersea cable that connects Maldives to Sri Lanka will bring down international call charges from the Indian Ocean coral atoll, officials said Tuesday.Until the cable was commissioned this month, bilateral traffic of 600,000 minutes per month was routed via more expensive satellite links.

The undersea cable is a 20 million US dollar joint venture between Sri Lanka Telecom, owned by Japan’s NTT and the government of Sri Lanka and the Maldive state telecom firm, Dhiraagu.

“We expect call charges to fall,” Sri Lanka Telecom Chief Executive Officer Shoji Takahashi said.

“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?