Tag Archive for ‘Internet access’ at LIRNEasia

Tag Archive for 'Internet access'

Call for Papers: Infrastructure Regulation: What works, Why, and How do we know?
Deadline: 05 December 2008.

India: Internet, broadband fail to catch up with mobile growth

on September 4, 2008

The debate over Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) spectrum auctions and internet telephony comes at a time when international organizations and analysts are painting a starkly contrasting picture of the Indian telecom and IT sectors.

Recent International Telecommunication Union (ITU) data reveals that the success of India’s telecom revolution is restricted to mobile voice with very little to showcase in fixed line and internet access, or high-speed broadband. For a country that is the global IT and ITeS capital or the world’s back office, its own internet penetration remains one of the lowest in the world. Forecasts are equally uninspiring, projecting high-speed internet access to remain abysmal till 2012.

Internet broadband penetration will limp along to eventually reach a measly 3.9 connections for every 100 citizens by 2012.…

Sri Lanka Pornography Regulatory Commission?

Chanuka Wattegama

on August 2, 2008

In one of the two websites it runs, Telecommunication Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka (TRCSL) gives its mission statement - which is cut and pasted below:

“To create the optimum conditions for the telecommunications industry in Sri Lanka by serving the public interest in terms of quality, choice and value for money; the service providers with equitable access to spectrum and other common resources; and the nation in its drive for socio-economic advancement through a skilled and ethical workforce.”

We are surprised to see pornography not mentioned – considering the latest task TRCSL has been assigned – blocking porno. Lankadeepa reports only about blocking pornographic movies and video clips, not images. Assumed strict enforcement, this can lead to the ban of not just YouTube but Gmail and…

24 Comments
Tags: Cuba, Indonesia, Internet access, Internet censorship aim blocking political content, North Korea, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Telecommunication Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka, telecommunications industry, Thailand, YouTube.

Broadbasing Broadband: Times of India -Editorial

Chanuka Wattegama

on April 5, 2008

Technology is full of paradoxes. While Moore’s Law ensures that our computers get cheaper and faster every few months, there is no corresponding law that ensures that the same happens with our internet connections. TRAI data shows that some 60 million people in India have access to the internet. This may seem like a substantive figure, but is only 6 per cent of the population. More shocking is that while India has over 46 million wireless internet subscribers, broadband subscribers number a mere 2.47 million. It is ironic that in a country famed for its IT services, internet connectivity in general and broadband connectivity in particular is so poor.

India has, in fact, one of the lowest broadband subscriber penetration rates in Asia. So what accounts…

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Tags: Asia, Broadband, India, Internet access, Internet connections, Internet connectivity, Times of India, United States, wireless internet subscribers.

Liberalisation key for next billion Internet users: OECD

Abu Saeed Khan

on February 21, 2008

An OECD report, Global Opportunities for Internet Access Developments, says that the next billion Internet users will be very different from the first billion and governments in developing countries, where these users will come from, must adapt strategic regulatory and investment policies to lower access costs.

“The characteristics of these new Internet users will be vastly different from the first billion users,” the report concludes, adding that the majority of the new Internet users will be accessing the Internet on wireless networks and will have incomes of less than US$2 per day.

While the report sees encouraging signs from developing markets that have adopted market liberalisation and who are now starting to enjoy the employment, micro- entrepreneurial and social development benefits of increased competition, there…

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Tags: gateway services, Internet access, Internet Access Developments, Internet users, OECD, USD, wireless networks.

Internet access as basic human right and Burma’s undersea cable

Rohan Samarajiva

on October 8, 2007

Looks like international law is being made as we speak. According to the UN, basic human rights are violated when countries cut off Internet access. Burma is not the first. King Gyanendra of Nepal cut off everything in his palace coup. If cutting off Internet is a violation of human rights, what is cutting off phone service to entire regions like Jaffna? More people use the phone than the Internet.

The story about the undersea cable is quite intriguing. To the best of my knowledge, SEA-ME-WE 3 is the cable the government official is referring to (they were not part of the SEA-ME-WE 4 consortium). I have not checked this fact, but my recollection is that Burma had been disconnected from SEA-ME-WE 3 for non-payment some…

6 Comments
Tags: Ban Ki-moon, Burma, Geneva, Gyanendra, Hamadoun Toure, International Telecommunications Union, Internet access, Internet blockage, Myanmar, Myanmar government, Nepal, telecommunications agency, United Nations.

Micropayments in a developed world; m-payments in our world

Rohan Samarajiva

on August 27, 2007

The article below talks about micro payments in the context of almost everyone having computers, Internet access, credit cards, etc. What we are talking about is m-payments (m for mobile, not micro) in a world where those assumptions don’t hold. But there may be ideas we can pick up from this discussion.

In Online World, Pocket Change Is Not Easily Spent - New York Times

The idea of micropayments — charging Web users tiny amounts of money for single pieces of online content — was essentially put to sleep toward the end of the dot-com boom. In December 2000, Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor in New York University’s interactive telecommunications program, wrote a manifesto that people still cite whenever someone suggests resurrecting the idea. Micropayments will never…

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Tags: cents, Clay Shirky, interactive telecommunications, Internet access, New York University, online content, Online World, Spent - New York Times, USD, Web users tiny amounts.

Engineers work to reconnect Peru

Chanuka Wattegama

on August 20, 2007

Technicians and engineers from Telecoms Sans Frontieres have arrived in Peru to help the earthquake recovery effort. The five-strong team will deploy satellite telephone and internet access in three centres - at Pisco, where the quake hit hardest, Ica and Chincha.

Full Story:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6951981.stm

1 Comment
Tags: Internet access, Peru, satellite telephone.

The trials and tribulations of connecting Rwanda to the WWW

Tahani Iqbal

on July 23, 2007

How the technical, political and business realities in Africa hinder technological development and connectivity there.

Africa, Offline: Waiting for the Web

Attempts to bring affordable high-speed Internet service to the masses have made little headway on the continent. Less than 4 percent of Africa’s population is connected to the Web; most subscribers are in North African countries and the republic of South Africa.

A lack of infrastructure is the biggest problem. In many countries, communications networks were destroyed during years of civil conflict, and continuing political instability deters governments or companies from investing in new systems. E-mail messages and phone calls sent from some African countries have to be routed through Britain, or even the United States, increasing expenses and delivery times. About 75 percent of African Internet…

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Tags: Africa, Britain, communications networks, fiber optic, high-speed Internet, high-speed Internet service, Internet access, Internet Age, Internet service, Internet traffic, Lawrence H. Landweber, Republic of South Africa, Rwanda, slower satellite technology, telecommunications, United States, University of Wisconsin, Wisconsin.

Vint Cerf on mobile phones as a means of accessing the Internet

Rohan Samarajiva

on July 5, 2007

Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet now at Google, appears to see a key role for the mobile especially in developing countries.

ACM: Ubiquity - Cerf’s Up Again! — A New Ubiquity Interview with Vint Cerf

CERF: Well, certainly that has happened in the sense that the mobile telephony has allowed the provision of communication services, and let me include in that Internet access, in places where it was very difficult to obtain that service before. And so, I think roughly the number of telephone terminations has more than doubled in the last five years. It’s gone from a little over a billion to a little over 2.3 billion. And the 1.3 billion of the 2.3 billion are mobile telephones. So, it has had…

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Tags: Broadband, broadband wireless capabilities, cellular telephone, coaxial cable, communication services, Google, GSM system, Internet access, Internet Vint Cerf, Internet-capable, mobile phones, mobile telephony, mobile telephony deployment, optical fiber, physical infrastructure, telephone terminations, These devices, Ultra wideband radio, universal tool, Web surfing, with these increasingly complex systems.

Google proposes real-time auction for efficient spectrum use

Divakar Goswami

on May 22, 2007

Google has proposed to the FCC that instead of getting into long-term contracts for allocating spectrum, companies buying spectrum should be free to resell the spectrum in real-time auctions. This would probably not involve human beings in protracted auction negotiations but rather negotiations between devices in real-time. Since FCC’s auction is done at the wholesale level it would probably involve companies reselling spectrum that they won to consumers on real-time basis.

NYT: “The driving reason we’re doing this is that there are not enough broadband options for consumers,” said Adam Kovacevich, a spokesman for Google’s policy office in Washington. “In general, it’s the belief of a lot of people in the company that spectrum is allocated in an inefficient manner.”

“In their proposal, Google executives argue that…

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Tags: Adam Kovacevich, Broadband, digital services, Federal Communications Commission, Google, Internet access, real-time auction, Reed Hunt, retail prices, the New York Times, Washington, wireless handsets, wireless spectrum.

Can HSDPA leapfrog infrastructure bottlenecks to bring Indonesia online?

Divakar Goswami

on March 16, 2007

Most Indonesians access the Internet primarily using fixed wireline infrastructure, mostly dialup. Because of lack of competition in the fixed line sector due to various reasons fixed line growth has been stagnant which has also affected Internet growth in the country. Not only are no new lines being added to bring more homes online, the inadequate backbone infrastructure in large swathe of the country makes deployment of broadband services unviable even if incumbent’s local loop bottleneck could be bypassed.

However, yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (March 15, 2007) seems to suggest that high speed 3G wireless technology like HSDPA can bring broadband on a large scale to Indonesians. It (misleadingly) implies that since HSDPA is merely a software upgrade to 3G networks it will not require any new…

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Tags: 3G, 3G mobile-phone technology, 3G services, 3G technology, ADSL, Asia, backbone infrastructure, Broadband, broadband services, cable networks, cellphone technology, cellular networks, connectivity solution, connectivity solutions, Dev Yusmananda, Djarot Handoko, Ericsson, fiber optic, fixed wireline infrastructure, flood, high speed 3G wireless technology, HSDPA technology, inadequate backbone infrastructure, Indonesia, Indosat, Internet access, Internet connections, Internet download speeds, Jakarta, least-developed communications systems, local telecommunications, Malaysia, mobile-phone technology, Nokia, potential Internet users, PT Excelcomindo Pratama, PT Indonesia Satellite Corp., PT Telekomunikasi Selular, SouthEast Asia, Surabaya, telecom infrastructure, the Philippines, Wall Street Journal.

Internet out in Jaffna, according to Free Media Movement

Rohan Samarajiva

on January 30, 2007

Free media Movement – Sri Lanka
Press Release

30 January 2007

Internet facilities and 8,000 telephones cut off in Jaffna Peninsula

The Free Media Movement (FMM) is deeply disturbed to learn that basic communications facilities to the Jaffna Peninsula have been blocked from 28th January 2007. Internet facilities and around 8,000 landline telephones of Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT) are dysfunctional to date. SLT, jointly owned by the Sri Lankan Government and Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corporation (NTT) of Japan, is the sole Internet provider in Jaffna Peninsula with a population of around 600,000 according to official statistics.

The FMM was told that there is no official decision by the Telecommunication Regulatory Authority to block communications in this manner in the Peninsula.

However, a number of citizens in Jaffna and journalists confirm…

11 Comments
Tags: basic communications facilities, basic telephony, Colombo, Free Media Movement, Internet, Internet access, Internet facilities, Jaffna, Jaffna peninsula, Japan, mobile phones, Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corporation, Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka Telecom, Sri Lankan government, Sunanda Deshapriya, Sunil Jayasekara, Telecommunication Regulatory Authority, United Nations, www.freemediasrilanka.org.

Colloquium on Pakistan’s Telecommunication Sector

Tahani Iqbal

on December 1, 2006

As part of the Six Country Indicators Project, Joseph presented the interim findings from the Pakistan country study (over Skype). The study assesses Pakistan’s telecom sector and regulatory performance. It employs the common methodology and list of indicators adopted for the Six Country study.

1 Comment
Tags: Balochistan, Blackberry, Broadband, cents, corporate mobile email solutions, EDGE, fixed and mobile telecom services, free on-net text services, GPRS/MMS, Internet access, Internet subscribers, law/policy, Long Distance, Pakistan, SMS, Telenor, United States, USD, video conferencing, wireless local loop.

Internet through mobile networks in Bangladesh

Rohan Samarajiva

on November 25, 2006

A story worth checking out.

Have the Bangladesh mobile operators solved the problems of providing reliable and cost-effective Internet connections over GSM networks?

Internet Extends Reach Of Bangladeshi Villagers - washingtonpost.com

Villages in one of the world’s poorest countries, long isolated by distance and deprivation, are getting their first Internet access, all connected over cellphones. And in the process, millions of people who have no land-line telephones, and often lack electricity and running water, in recent months have gained access to services considered basic in richer countries: weather reports, e-mail, even a doctor’s second opinion.Cellphones have become a new bridge across the digital divide between the world’s rich and poor, as innovators use the explosive growth of cellphone networks to connect people to the Internet.

Bangladesh now has about…

10 Comments
Tags: Bangladesh, cellphone networks, download job applications, electricity, GSM, Internet access, Internet centers, Internet connections, Internet Extends Reach Of, Internet phone calls, online dictionaries, Web cameras.

Colloquium: Indonesia Sector Performance/Indicators study

Ayesha Zainudeen

on November 9, 2006

As part of the Six Country Indicators Project, Divakar presents the interim findings from the Indonesia country study. The study assesses Indonesia’s telecom sector and regulatory performance. It employs the common methodology and list of indicators adopted for the Six Country study.

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Tags: 2G services, 3G, ADSL, Bakrie Group, Fixed wireless operators, fixed wireless subscriber, GSM, Harsha de Silva, India, Indonesia, Internet access, Internet penetration, ISP, Java, Lorraine Carlos Salazar, mobile Internet, New government, Philippines, PT Indosat, PT Telekom, Satelindo, Singapore, Thailand, VOIP, wireless access.

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