This may require changes in LIRNEasia’s (and Singapore’s) efforts to improve broadband quality of service experience through benchmark regulation or otherwise, using as one of the measures, Round Trip Time to the Internet cloud, defined as first point of landing in the US.  An alternative will not be easy to come by, but we have faith in the wisdom of the many.   Please contribute.

These disruptions have major consequences for any business that relies on telecom for delivering their services, including, banking, trading, call centers, remotely managed services etc. This event also underlines the necessity for redundancy and why policymakers and regulators must liberalize international gateways to allow a number of different submarine cables connecting different destinations to land in a country.
From Bloomberg:

Damaged cables include the APCN2 cable and Sea-Me-We3 cables, Chunghwa’s Leng said. Eight STM-1 cables from Okinawa off Japan and 4 STM-1 cables to Shanghai are acting as backup, Chunghwa said in a statement. The company may also use the ST-1 satellite.
Singapore Telecom, France Telecom SA and Pakistan Telecommunication Co. are among companies that own the Sea-Me-We3 cables linking Europe to Asia. Operators in the APCN2 cable network that connects Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore include China Unicom Ltd., StarHub Ltd., Telekom Malaysia Bhd. and Telstra Corp.
[..]“The repairs could take two to three weeks,” said Leng Tai-feng, president of Chunghwa Telecom Co.’s international business. The Taipei-based company, Taiwan’s largest phone operator, said two of its undersea cables were cut.
HSBC Holdings Plc said its online banking services were down, while Chunghwa said almost no calls could be made to Southeast Asia, causing disruption to companies including First State Investments in Singapore.
“I can’t trade if I don’t know the prices,” said David Leong, who heads the Singapore trading desk at First State, which manages $15 billion in equities in Asia and emerging markets. “I’ve put in limit orders to try to minimize the damage, but even then you need to have the basic information.”

• Executives from telecom operators and equipment suppliers interested in innovative ideas that can be applied in developing as well as developed country settings.
• Policy makers, regulators, researchers and professionals interested in cutting edge ICT policy research

  Download course brochure (PDF)
  Download course registration (Word Document)
  Download course registration (PDF)

The research that will be discussed includes:

• A multi-country study to understand the telecom strategies of the poor covering 3200 respondents in India and Sri Lanka as well as a meta-study of Bangladesh
• A backbone study that looks at the terms and conditions of access where they exist and the consequences of their absence or exclusionary access regimes in South Asia.
• An assessment of the first Asian least cost subsidies auctions being implemented in Eastern Nepal, with  comparison of the nascent Sri Lankan case.
• An assessment of the extension of network in rural areas using access deficit charges & universal service in India, a country that with the second largest universal service fund in the world. 
• An examination of the use of business-NGO partnerships to extend rural connectivity and the factors that are required for success based on the experience of Bangladesh.
• An exploration of the possibilities for stimulating bottom-up business approaches to encourage local private operators, investors and co-operatives to participate in sustainable ICT service development in Bhutan.
• An evaluation of the use of WiFi for extending connectivity at the margins, including the scalability and impact of availability and pricing of broadband capacity to link to the Internet backbone. 
• A study to understand supply and demand for ICTs by measuring access and usage in Africa, to develop an e-Index

India’s incumbent international operator, VSNL, announced today that it had agreed to buy Teleglobe, the largest international voice over IP (VoIP) carrier in the world — and former Canadian monopoly overseas voice carrier. Should the deal meet with shareholder approval and pass regulatory review, the merged company — which also includes the recently integrated Tyco Global Network — would become one of the largest multinational providers of voice, Internet, and bandwidth services.
VOICE
Teleglobe became the largest carrier in the 30 billion minute international VoIP market when it acquired ITXC in 2004. Although VoIP represented under 15 percent of the global call market in 2004, it is growing at double to triple the rate of the traditional public switched voice market. Combined with Teleglobe’s wholesale voice operations around the world, VSNL will become the fifth largest carrier of voice minutes in the world.
INTERNET
Although VSNL is a significant carrier of voice minutes in its own right, its international Internet infrastructure has been limited to a few routes out of India. With the acquisition of Teleglobe, VSNL will be adding backbone Internet connectivity to 14 new countries, bringing its total to 17. Still, the combined VSNL and Teleglobe international Internet backbone puts it only in the top 30 of global backbone providers. This may change rapidly if VSNL builds out its Internet infrastructure to serve India’s growing demand for corporate bandwidth.
BANDWIDTH
By purchasing Teleglobe, VSNL will be pairing Teleglobe, a major wholesale services provider, with the Tyco Global Network, a major provider of wholesale submarine and terrestrial network capacity that VSNL acquired recently. As of early 2005, Teleglobe owned or controlled part of 90 submarine and terrestrial network systems, as well as satellite connectivity around the world. Although other carriers, such as AT&T and MCI, may connect to more individual city locations, few companies are known to control capacity on as many different systems.

source: TeleGeography

http://www.telegeography.com/products/tg

1. WDR Expert Forum 2004

• September’s WDR Expert Forum at Mount Lavinia was a success
• Next expert forum in Sri Lanka: Sept. 30 , Oct 1 and 2 [half day], 2005
• Sector and Regulatory Performance Indicators: may be WDR theme for
  2005/6; proposed workshop for this in early 2005 ? Pondicherry.

2. Funding

• We don’t have institutional funding, only project-based.
• This will be a challenge, but I’m (Rohan) confident we’ll pull it off. We spent under budget for the forum.

3. Projects

• IDRC wants us to study ‘diversity of participation in networks.’ Currently, demand side info/knowledge is lacking.
• Supply side: Nepal, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh

i. Assessment of Asia’s first least-cost subsidy auction in Eastern Nepal, and comparison with the Sri Lanka least-cost subsidy auction design. Team: Rohan Samarajiva, Harsha de Silva (B.R. Pandey)

ii. Assessment of the design and implementation of India’s universal service levies, fund and associated policy and regulatory instruments including the Access Deficit Charge (ADC). Team: Harsha de Silva,Payal Malik

iii. Evaluation of the replicability of the WiFi based access innovations in Indonesia, looking at both the scalability of the WiFi based expansion of access at the margins and the impact of the availability and pricing of broadband capacity to link to the Internet backbone. Team: Sabina Fernando, Onno Purbo

iv. Study of the conditions for replicating the Grameen Telecom of Bangladesh, approach of extending access to telephone services through microfinance mechanisms. Team: Malathy Knight-John, Abu Saeed Khan, Ayesha Zainudeen