Teleuse@BOP3, LIRNEasia’s six country study has shown that between 2006 and 2008 there has been significant uptake of mobiles by the BOP in emerging Asia. Access to computers on the other hand (see here for numbers)  in these countries at the BOP is minimal.  Together with the increasing capabilities of mobiles to deliver an array of services, which essentially boil down to what you can do on the Internet (information publication and retrieval, transactions, etc) this means that much of the BOP will have their first Internet experience through a mobile.

The current issue of Nokia’s Expanding Horizons quarterly magazine highlights LIRNEasia’s Teleuse@BOP3 study findings from India, illustrating this point.

Mobiles are now the most common form of communication, pushing public phones into second place… The rapid evolution…

Several years back, Korea topped the OECD’s broadband rankings and the ITU’s Digital Opportunity Index. That caused a lot of countries to reexamine their broadband policies. It caused others to develop new indices. The NYT carries a report on one:

After the United States, the ranking found that Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway rounded out the five most productive users of connectivity. Japan ranked 10, and Korea, 18.

And while wired and wireless broadband networks used by consumers lagged other countries, the United States ranked No. 1 in the world for technology use and skills by consumers. (This was measured by comparing countries on five measures: The penetration of Internet use, penetration of Internet banking, wired and wireless voice minutes per capita, SMS messages per capita, and…

The story is based on US data, but it is still grist for the mill as we think about how the mobile and Internet will change the mediasphere in emerging Asia.

We are so smitten with screens that we often can’t bear to choose one over another: 31 percent of Internet use occurs while we’re in front of a TV set. We are also taking an interest in watching video on our phones: 100 million handsets are video-capable.

The Internet is a public space, and like any public space it is not without danger. But the scare stories are overhyped as the NYT story based on a USD 50 million research project shows:

Good news for worried parents: All those hours their teenagers spend socializing on the Internet are not a bad thing, according to a new study by the MacArthur Foundation.

“It may look as though kids are wasting a lot of time hanging out with new media, whether it’s on MySpace or sending instant messages,” said Mizuko Ito, lead researcher on the study, “Living and Learning With New Media.” “But their participation is giving them the technological skills and literacy they need to succeed in the contemporary world. They’re learning how to get along…

Divakar presents findings of his study that assesses the success of WiFi based expansion of Internet access and identifies the conditions that gave rise to this innovation in Indonesia.

DG: Indonesia is a challenging country to connect. 17000 islands. teledensity is 12%, compares poorly with its neighbors. Internet penetration is far lower than Asian average.
 So what has given rise to Wifi in Indonesia?

• Regulatory conditions (non independent regulator, exclusivities, no local loop unbundling, etc.)
• lack of competition in infrastructure sector (leading to very high prices and proliferation of unlicensed ISPs, etc)
• extent of infrastructural development (uneven backbone development, leased-lines not available)
• grassroots activism (lobbying to get 2.4GHz unlicensed, etc)

Lessons learnt:

• hostile environment spawned Wifi and related innovations; can this be replicated without the baggage?
• Wifi is quick and involves less hassle  in…