Chairman PTA said that for mobile phone industry future direction could be value addition and innovation in services including mobile commerce, video streaming, and high speed mobile internet.

He said presently broadband costs are high in the country but broadband usage was showing growth in the recent quarter. He said that PTA has carried out surveys to know the socio economic impact of mobile phone, which revealed that with the introduction of mobile communications productivity has increased significantly.

He said that the spectacular rise of telecom industry in Pakistan and especially the mobile sector has been the focus of attention. The sector has exhibited a growth rate of around 40 per cent over the previous year.

The mobile subscriber base has crossed the 90 million mark while still adding around 2 million subscribers each month and the growth trend continues. Today mobile coverage is available to over 90 per cent of the population and with implementation of upcoming technology the services will be available to almost entire population.

Chairman PTA said that our focus is on the proliferation of broadband services in the country at affordable rates. The Authority is aware of the developments taking place worldwide in the 3G mobile communications (mobile broadband).

Read the full story in ‘The News’ here.

LIRNEasia researchers participated at the International Telecommunications Society (ITS) 17th Biennial Conference in Montreal, Canada, from June 24-27 2008. The theme of the conference was on, ‘The Changing Structure of the Telecommunications Industry and the New Role of Regulation’.

The picture above shows Professor Sudharma Yoonaidharma, Commissioner, National Telecommunciations Commission of Thailand commenting on the presentations made at the second of the two LIRNE.NET sessions, watched by (from left) Rohan Samarajiva and Payal Malik from LIRNEasia, Roxana Barrentes from DIRSI and Anders Henten from LIRNE Europe.  The session was chaired by Hank Intven, Partner at the leading Canadian firm of McCarthy Tetrault (not in the picture).

At a double LIRNE.NET panel, entitled, ‘New regulatory approaches in the face of rapidly changing demand: Research from four continents presented by LIRNE.NET’, Rohan Samarajiva made a presentation on ‘Banded forbearance: A new approach to price regulation’; Helani Galpaya presented a paper on ‘Non-owner teleusers at the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) in emerging Asia’, based on LIRNEasia research carried out in mid-2006. Payal Malik presented a study on ‘Scrapping the access deficit charge in India: A case of tardy regulatory response’.

Researchers from sister-networks, Research ICT Africa (RIA!), and the Latin American and Caribbean Regional Dialogue on the Information Society (DIRSI), also presented their research carried out in their respective regions during these sessions.

Payal and Rohan presented a paper on ‘Re-examining universal service policies in telecommunications lessons from three South Asian countries’ during the session on ‘Universal Access: Definitions, Delivery and Alternatives’.

Payal and Helani also chaired sessions on ‘Evolving Market Structure’ and ‘Country Studies’ respectively.

The Partnership on Measuring ICT for Development is an international, multi-stakeholder initiative to improve the availability and quality of ICT data and indicators, particularly in developing countries. It provides an open framework for coordinating ongoing and future activities, and for developing a coherent and structured approach to advancing the development of ICT indicators globally.

George Sciadas of StatsCanada also made a presentation at this event. He highlighted LIRNEasia’s intervention to remove the proposed regressive tax on mobile phones, using its 2006 T@BOP2 survey data as an example of statistics and data being used successfully.

Using interviews and a questionnaire administered to a statistically significant cross-section of industry stakeholders and experts, the TRE assessment traverses six dimensions of regulatory risk (market entry, access to scarce resources, interconnection, tariff regulation, regulation of anti-competitive practice and universal service) for both the fixed and mobile sectors.

The TRE methodology focuses on the environment as a whole, rather than only on the regulatory agency. This broadens the scope and usefulness of the study to different actors.

DIRSI and LIRNE.NET are currently undertaking TRE studies in Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador. The Latin American TRE researchers are using the beta version of a TRE Toolkit developed by LIRNEasia – and making suggestions for its improvement and development, especially from a cross-cultural perspective.

Powered by ScribeFire.

She presented her report on “Documenting the Capabilities of Measuring ICT Statistics in India”. Her report raised great interest among the participants. In an extension to the LIRNEasia work on indicators this report profiled the institutions that collect ICT data in India , with some observations about the methodology and the limitations. The reference point for the exercise is the ‘metadata survey’, a global exercise to collect information from all countries regarding the statistical measurement of ICT (reported in “The global status of ICT indicators”) conducted by global Partnership on Measuring ICT for Development. The report also provided a tabular concordance of the Indian ICT data with the core indicators as identified in the Partnership manual. Finally, the report critically analysed the status of measurement of ICT statistics in India in the framework provided by the OECD Guide for Measuring Information Society.

Author Posting. (c) Taylor & Francis, 2007. This is the author’s version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Taylor & Francis for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in The Information Society, Volume 23 Issue 2, March 2007. doi:10.1080/01972240701224200 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01972240701224200)

This particular report also ranks countries by something called the ICT Opportunity Index. According to this ranking, Zimbabwe (Rank = 127) has greater ICT opportunities than Pakistan (139), India (133) and Sri Lanka (128).

Readers of this website are generally aware of the rapid growth of telecom in these three countries, and India is pretty much a brand name for ICT these days. How Zimbabwe, with one of the worst records of misgovernance in the world can do better than these three countries is a subject worthy of debate.

For the record, Zimbabwe was heading for 1500% inflation in January 2007 according to African sources, and its diplomats had not been paid for months. The telecom sector in Zimbabwe seems to be in crisis as well.

So, the question are, is the ITU’s ICT Opportunity Index flawed? If yes, how? If not, should Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka strive to emulate Zimbabwe’s monetary and telecom regulatory practices?

This conference funded by the International Development Research Centre – Canada,  is being organized in support of the growing community of researchers and practitioners conducting research on the social, cultural, psychological, economic, political, and other transformations brought about by information and communications technologies (ICT) in the Asia-Pacific region.

The conference provides a forum for discussing life in the information society. Over 75 papers will be presented by researchers from different countries and disciplines on the usage and effects of ICTs on culture and society. Further, it is relevant to bring together people doing work on the impact of ICTs in the South, where the context presents new challenges and implications.

The conference will showcase an diverse set of panels comprising outstanding papers from around the world who are investigating the diverse impact of ICTs on people, work and communities in the Asia Pacific.  The conference
panels include:

• ICTs & Politics/Democratization/Social Movements

• ICTs & Political Mobilization

• ICTs & Online Relationships

• Mobile Phone Relationship

• E-Learning

• E-Governance

• M-Commerce

• ICTs & Rural Development/Agricultural Communities

• ICTs & Identities

• Digital Divide

• Technology Adoption

• Bridging Access

• ICTs & Work

• Call Center Work

• Virtual Organizations

• ICT Policy/Privacy/Legal Issues

• ICTs & Gender

The Conference expects to bring together 300 representatives from the academe, government, ICT industry, ICT-related societies, private sector and other development institutions from over 25 countries.  With this, the conference organizers expect that a lively exchange of ideas on the diverse aspects of ICT research will be generated.

The conference fee covers the conference materials, lunch, snacks and beverages:

• $150 (for  participants from economically developed nations (per capita income over $10,000 US)

• $100 for participants from economically developing nations (per capita income less than $10,000US) and students

The registration forms together with the tentative conference agenda can be downloaded above.    

NOTE: This conference is being organised by the Philippine ICT Researchers Network through the National College of Public Administration and Governance (NCPAG) of the University of the Philippines. Please contact  Ms. Cheryll Soriano of the Conference Secretariat at research.ict(at)gmail.com  for all inquiries

Download Call for Papers

The Philippine ICT Researchers Network through the National College of Public Administration and Governance of the University of the Philippines is hosting an international conference on “Living the Information Society: The Impact of Information and Communication Technologies on People, Work and Communities in Asia.” This conference will be held at the Renaissance Hotel, Makati City on April 23-24, 2007. The event is also co-sponsored by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC).

The UN summit in Tunis last month did not turn out to be the showdown expected between the and the rest of the world.
That particular non-event, and the anti-social behavior of ‘s police, took the headlines, such as they were. By the end, journalists were reduced to counting the number of delegates (19,400), sessions (316) and participating organizations (264).
It is worth recalling that one of the key missions of the grandly-named World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) was to figure out ways of narrowing the digital divide.
And despite the grandstanding, WSIS did leave behind a few small straws of progress for the three billion citizens on planet earth who don’t have access to modern communications. I’m not talking about the 2,500 unknown tele-development projects claimed by the ITU, or its under-subscribed Digital Solidarity Fund.
ITU secretary-general Yoshio Utsumi sniffed that rich western nations, who elected not to write checks to his fund, suffered from a "limited" understanding of the divide. That’s one way of looking at it. Or it may be that governments these days are wary of throwing public monies at the UN. Or perhaps rather than kick in cash for "solidarity", donors prefer to fund real solutions.
Addressing the divide
One is the expansion of the village phone program pioneered by Grameen Telecom in . The concept has trialed successfully in and the main instigator, the Grameen Foundation , has picked up Nokia as a technology supporter.
There had been skepticism about how well the village phone concept would port to other markets beyond its home in . Supposedly ‘s high population density and homogeneity made it exceptional among developing nations.
Not so. The Ugandan trial has set up village phones in 2,800 villages, each serving 500 to 1,000 people. Another pilot is underway in , and Grameen is also exploring possibilities in the and.
The village phone is another application of the micro-finance concept pioneered by Professor Muhammad Yunus. Grameen Phone, a JV between Telenor and the non-profit Grameen Telecom, has put a phone service into 165,000 Bangladeshi villages, each yielding an ARPU higher than that of the average business user on the network.
The powerful thing about the Grameen approach is it’s not charity. Typically, one person – always a woman – in each village is given funding to buy a phone business, typically with a loan of about $180. She gets a phone, antenna, access to wholesale airtime rates, marketing collateral, and training. In turn she earns income by selling airtime to other villagers.
"Village phone is not selling a phone, it’s selling a business opportunity. We give them the opportunity to create an ICT-based business," said David Keogh, deputy director at the Grameen Foundation ‘s Grameen Technology Center.
While Nokia is backing the village phone, rival Ericsson has hooked up with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) to improve rural mobile coverage.
Johan Bergendahl, Ericsson’s head of marketing, says one of the hard things was to get local operators on board. "It was difficult to encourage those operators sitting in cities with pretty good coverage" to take it seriously, he said. But under the model devised, operators can come in on a "pay as you grow" basis, eliminating most of the risk.
Skeptics might believe that the interest of Nokia and Ercisson is less about bridging the divide than setting themselves up for fresh orders of networks and handsets. Well, I should hope so.
It’s surely much healthier to treat the world’s under-privileged as customers or potential business partners than as hapless poor who need our charity and sympathy.
And if multinational vendors can do well while doing good, that is better than throwing taxpayer dollars on dubious charity projects and nebulous feel-good funds.

Chanuka was the lead researcher on a LIRNEasia project to Benchmark National Telecom Regulatory Authority websites of the Asia-Pacific Region, and recently took up a post at Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme in Colombo.

]]> http://lirneasia.net/2005/10/lirneasia-researcher-at-international-workshop-on-building-an-information-society-road-to-tunis-dhaka/feed/ 0 http://lirneasia.net/2005/06/undp-asia-pacific-development-information-programme-undp-apdip-releases-ordig-policy-brief-and-input-paper-on-internet-governance-7-june-2005/ http://lirneasia.net/2005/06/undp-asia-pacific-development-information-programme-undp-apdip-releases-ordig-policy-brief-and-input-paper-on-internet-governance-7-june-2005/#comments Mon, 13 Jun 2005 04:17:40 +0000 Indi Samarajiva http://www.lirneasia.net/2005/06/undp-asia-pacific-development-information-programme-undp-apdip-releases-ordig-policy-brief-and-input-paper-on-internet-governance-7-june-2005/ Voices from Asia-Pacific: Internet Governance Priorities and Recommendations:

After almost ten months of research and activities, UNDP-APDIP’s Open Regional Dialogue on Internet Governance (ORDIG*) has produced a two-part report entitled, “Voices from Asia-Pacific: Internet Governance Priorities and Recommendations” – consisting of 1) the ORDIG Policy Brief and Executive Summary, and 2) the ORDIG Input Paper for the UN Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) and the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).

These documents stem from months of consultations involving stakeholder groups from the public and private sectors, as well as civil society.

ORDIG consulted over 3,000 stakeholders through sub-regional meetings, jointly organized with UNESCAP and others; a region-wide online forum that allowed for open and candid discussions on the issues; and a region-wide, multi-lingual, issues-based online survey that looked at the Internet governance priorities of the region.

The resulting two reports are the synthesis, consolidation, and reading of the voices from the Asia-Pacific region. They outline the principles and dimensions that make up the framework for building recommendations, which are provided in the documents at two levels – general and specific recommendations.

Issues and recommendations covered in the Infrastructure dimension are access costs, VOIP, and wireless networks. Issues and recommendations covered in the Logical dimension are DNS management, IP address management, and technical standards. Issues covered in the Content dimension are content pollution (spam, viruses, spyware, etc.) and cybercrime. Issues covered in the Social/Developmental dimension are culture diversity and participation.

The “Voices from Asia-Pacific: Internet Governance Priorities and Recommendations” documents were shared with and endorsed by delegates at the High Level Asia-Pacific Conference for the World Summit on the Information Society, in Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran (31 May-2 June 2005).

Furthermore, these reports will be provided to the WGIG at their upcoming Fourth Meeting (14-17 June 2005), as the Asia-Pacific input for the Working Group’s deliberation.

For all documents, please go to:

ORDIG Policy Brief

http://igov.apdip.net/ORDIG_Policy_Brief.pdf

ORDIG Input Paper

http://igov.apdip.net/ORDIG_Paper.pdf

ORDIG Survey Report http://igov.apdip.net/ORDIG.Survey.Report.pdf

ORDIG Forum Summary http://igov.apdip.net/undp-apdip%20forum%20summary.pdf

Contact:

Phet Sayo, UNDP-APDIP Programme Specialist, phet@apdip.net

=======================

* ORDIG is an initiative of UNDP’s Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme (UNDP-APDIP), in collaboration with the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP), and the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC). It was carried out with the aid of a grant from the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada.